Long Takes in 'The War Room'

Behind the Scenes of the Campaign Trail: Long Takes in The War Room

By Aden Jordan

 

            In the essay "When Less Is Less: The Long Take in Documentary", David MacDougall writes extensively on some of the advantages and limitations of utilizing long takes in documentary films. For my essay, I want to apply some of MacDougall's observations on the long take to The War Room (1993), a documentary that came out a year after MacDougall's essay was published. Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennabaker's documentary The War Room follows the 1992 presidential campaign trail of then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton and his campaign staff. Clinton only appears briefly in the film, and most of his appearances are taken from previous footage including television 'talking head' clips. Most of the film focuses on James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, the two main leaders behind Clinton's campaign. The film is clearly made in a cinema verite style that includes hand-held cameras, synchronous sound, and a number of prominent long takes. The War Room further cements its status as the product of direct cinema by not including voice-over or text that comments on the events in the film.

 

            The first characteristic to note about the film's use of long takes is that the technique does help to construct a feeling of being present with the campaign team as they brainstorm at their 'war room' headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. Throughout most of the film, the campaign staff members do not look at Hegedus and Pennabaker's cameras, which gives the impression that the staffers aren't bothered by or paying attention to the filmmakers. This combined with the use of long takes contributes to the 'fly-on-the-wall' effect that the filmmakers seem to be going for.

           

            Some of the long takes in the film provide geographical clarity of where the campaign trail events occur. MacDougall writes that "the long take may be crucial to defining the geographical context within which a character exists or an action takes place"[1] (42). A frequent visual motif in the film is a long take that follows Stephanopoulos and Carville as they walk through different locations. When the campaign team goes to an upscale hotel in New York City to plan for the Democratic convention, there is a long take of Carville and Stephanopoulos walking down a sidewalk and into the hotel. The brainstorming that the team does at the hotel is successful, and there is another long take of the two men walking out of the hotel and down the sidewalk when the staff is checking out of the hotel. These two similar long takes represent a cycle that is part of the film's narrative: the staff has to go from one place to another and surmount obstacles in each place they stop. There are also two consecutive long takes as Carville and Clinton walk down a stairwell and through a hallway to get to a convention stage. These long takes add to the film's 'fly-on-the-wall' style where the viewer can be behind-the-scenes with Clinton before he gives a public address. They also show the division between the public spaces where Clinton speaks, and the private spaces where he interacts with his staff.

 

            It is mainly through long takes that a character portrait of Carville is presented. MacDougall writes, "the long take can make possible a contextualising (sic) behavior which may be essential to recognising (sic) individual human identity" (43). Much can be learned or assumed about Carville through the sections of the film where his actions are filmed in long takes. His motivational speech near the start of the film is presented in a long take, and in his speech Carville comes across as driven and focused on the goals he wants to establish for the campaign. There's another long take where Carville is at a desk discussing President Bush, and as the take goes on Carville's words about Bush become more harsh. The long take builds up to Carville's analogy of Bush being the equivalent of a smelly old calendar, and the viewer sees that the easy-going Carville has a bitter side. Near the end of the film, Carville gives a thank you speech to his staff that is also filmed in a long take. Throughout the speech Carville attempts to hold back tears, and by not cutting during his speech the filmmakers show that Carville is capable of showing sensitivity even while trying to mask it.

 

            One of the drawbacks of using long takes in documentaries is that the technique can make cutting more noticeable or even distracting. There is a scene in The War Room where Mary Matalin, the head of President George Bush's campaign, is waiting to do an interview with a television news reporter. Their interaction is filmed in a long take where Matalin is friendly and semi-flirty with the male reporter. Matalin's amiable demeanor in the long take is in contrast to her earlier appearance where she is serious and aggressive while talking to reporters. The long take of Matalin and the reporter ends right as the reporter goes on the air, and the cut is very jarring mainly because the reporter is finishing a sentence as the cutting takes place. This is more than just a sloppy cut. By filming Matalin and the reporter in a long take, a pace is established and developed that feels intruded on by the inevitable cut.

 

            While the long takes in The War Room do add to the film's very realistic feel, it is important to heed MacDougall's words and "not revert to the naïve view that film footage is some kind of unmediated evidence which contains the "truth" about external reality" (41). This is especially something to keep in mind with The War Room where the two lead subjects, Carville and Stephanopoulos, are men who making their living by helping political figures like Clinton present themselves to the camera in the best possible light. While they might pretend to not notice the cameras around them, they knew that they were being filmed and likely put their best foot forward and did not let their guard down. As Louis Menand writes, "Carville and Stephanopoulos are allowed to pretend that the camera, which they are always perfectly conscious of, is not there" [2] (Menand, 'The War Room: Being There'). After all, they spend most of the documentary trying to prevent scandals from touching Clinton and wouldn't want to create one for him by behaving unfavorably in a documentary.

---

[1] MacDougall, David. "When Less Is Less: The Long Take in Documentary." Film Quarterly. Winter 1992-1993. Pp. 36-46. Print.

[2] Menand, Louis. "The War Room: Being There". The Criterion Collection. Web. 20 March 2012. http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2203-the-war-room-being-there

John Greyson speaking via Skype at the Flaherty NYC event, Anthology Film Archives, November 27, 2013.

I stitched together the several cell phone videos I shot. No idea why the second clip is upside down!

Dan Streible

(additional note) Slightly Off Angle: Orson Welles and Home Movies as Records of Production

A followup note to my previous post--  

Paul Dunbar, a noted Pathé newsreel-man was the cinematographer of Welles' Too Much Johnson. I thought this was particularly interesting considering Welles' relationship to newsreel, especially in his Citizen Kane "News on the March" reconstruction.

Slightly Off Angle: Orson Welles and Home Movies as Records of Production

            Monday night, I went to see the Orson Welles' recovered film Too Much Johnson (1938) at the Director's Guild of America Theatre. The event was hosted by the George Eastman House and the film was narrated by various curators and archivists who worked on the preservation of the film, including Paolo Usai Cherchi. Found in Italy in 2012, the recovered and restored 35mm print was screened for the first time at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival earlier this fall.

            While the feature film deserves its own dissecting of various Wellesian techniques (especially considering that it was actually intended to be a prologue for a theatre version of William Gillette's play), I would like to focus my discussion on the supplemental 16mm home movie that was screened directly after the 35mm print. This film, specifically distinguished as a "home movie," was—to to the best of my knowledge, considering its presentation notes at the screening—not found with the feature in Pordonene or restored with it in Pittsburgh, but rather it was originally located at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Doing a quick online search, I found a short clip of the 3 minute film along with archival information on the website of the National Film Preservation Foundation.[1] As the website details, the footage was donated by the family of Myron S. Falk, who was an investor in the Mercury Theatre.

            Seeing Welles directing is fascinating in itself, but it was also telling to see this home movie footage after the final scene of Too Much Johnson. As Paolo Usai Cherchi discussed at the Monday night screening, whoever was making the home movie was within close proximity to the cameraman of Too Much Johnson. While the short film cut between Welles and the scene he was directing, the final scene of Too Much Johnson, depicting two women running towards the camera and then stopping and screaming (played by Virginia Nicholson Welles and Ruth Ford), can be seen just slightly off angle as compared to the feature film footage. In the feature film, these women ran towards the camera and were then presented in a close up shot depicting only their faces. In the home movie, the women are presented in a medium shot, from the just above the knees upward. This angle along with the recording of actors acting and Welles directing is an especially important "history of below."[2] It at once preserves fragments of the Too Much Johnson film production while presenting the enigmatic persona of Orson Welles. As a home movie, this is a private history rather than a public production. It places its audience in closer proximity to Welles, whom scholars and fans have been trying to dissect for decades. While Welles is still very much acting while he directs, his mannerisms and temperament are in accord with the histories of his volatile but jovial temperament. This short fragment of his directorial work adds just one more dimension to his persona.

In her introductory discussion of home movies, Patricia Zimmerman quotes Jim Sharpe on history from below:

"those writing history from below have not only provided a body of work which permits us to know more about the past: they have also made it plain there is a great deal more, much of its secret still lurking in unexplored evidence, which could be known. Thus history from below retains its subversive aura."[3]

Zimmerman continues this discussion:

"[h]istory from below raises questions about the nature of evidence, conceptual models, and methodology. These questions require moving beyond the traditional historiography of elites into intellectual alliances with social theory, anthropology, psychoanalysis, ethnography, and even science to admit—and find—new source material that tells different stories of those who have been denied a history."[4]

While Orson Welles is certainly not a subject of lost history, his disputes with the studio system and arguments over editing and post-production (especially in Magnificent Ambersons, Lady from Shanghai) suggests that there might be conflicting histories that can be rectified through a different avenue of study. Clearly, research within studio archives might reveal his correspondence with producers but home movie footage of Welles provides a different angle on this history.

            I would like to argue that memories of Welles preserved in this home movie footage are semi-private rather than completely private. While it is a home movie, the film depicts a semi-public event, especially considering the celebrity status of Welles—even during his early film career—and the commentary given during the Monday screening of Too Much Johnson, which suggested that the final "Cuba" scene was shot on an operating quarry in New York, Welles and his team actually disturbing their daily schedule. However, despite this public presence that might classify the film as a type of tabloid, popular culture newsreel, the time and space of the home movie presents a particular function. The film not only presents fragments of an until-recently lost production, but also is a unique composition of a particular, private memory. Welles was not only directing, but he was among co-workers, friends, and his at-the-time wife, Virginia Nicholson Welles. While located in an actual archive, the film also participates in an imaginary archive like those discussed in Zimmerman's introduction.[5] Shots of Welles in his ridiculous straw hat, carefully directing his wife are not unlike the home movies of non-celebrities' family holidays or trips to Disneyland. According to Zimmerman, "[t]hese heterogeneous locations and functions of amateur film suggest the need for a parallel pluralization of methodological approaches to chart this large, variegated, multicultural, and international domain of home movies and trauma."[6] Certainly, dissecting Orson Welles and his newly recovered film needs a pluralization of methodological approaches. Especially due to the intended multi-disciplinary nature of Too Much Johnson, it seems appropriate to juxtapose the telling historical home movie next to the restored film.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the future editing and production displays of Too Much Johnson. Adding the home movie to the end of the screening of Too Much Johnson as an epilogue-like artifact does change the viewing experience. Considering the state of the film and the preservation efforts, it was extremely educational and useful to see this home movie after the final scene. However, if coupled with actual re-imagined productions of the play as discussed in long-term plans, I doubt the home movie will be a necessary component.

 

-Carrie Reese

---

[1] http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/falk-home-movie

[2] Zimmerman, Patricia R. "The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts, Minings." In Mining the Home Movie Excavations in Histories and Memories. Eds. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. Page 3

[3] Sharpe in Zimmerman, 3

[4] Zimmerman, 3-4

[5] Zimmerman, 18

[6] Zimmerman, 6

Home Movies, Trauma, and the Marginalized: 'Tarnation' (2003)

Home Movies, Trauma, and the Marginalized: Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation (2003)

By Aden Jordan

           

In her introduction to Mining the Home Movie, Patricia R. Zimmerman writes about how the authors in the anthology believe that "the home movie can function as a recorder, an interrogator, a deferral, a condensation, and a mediator of historical traumas that extend beyond the self, such as labor, war, race, gender, religion, illness, diaspora, and displacement" [1](5). At multiple points in her essay, Zimmerman brings up the value of home movies in exploring and documenting historical and social traumas while simultaneously giving a voice to minority and marginalized groups affected by these traumas.

            Jonathan Caouette's documentary Tarnation (2003) is a relevant work for considering some of the ideas on home movies, trauma, and minority groups that Zimmerman discusses in her introduction. The trauma in Tarnation is not historical in the sense that Zimmerman uses the term, but is instead deeply personal. Caouette made Tarnation using hundreds of hours of home movie footage that he had created and kept since the age of 11. The film is an organized collage of Caouette's home movies that he edited using iMovie software to tell the story of his dysfunctional family. Using his home movies along with still photographs, voice messages, and text, Caouette presents the troubled life of his mother Renee. At a young age, Renee fell off the roof of her house and was unable to walk. A family friend suggested to Renee's parents, Adolph and Rosemary, that her paralysis might just be in her head. The parents consulted a doctor who suggested that Renee receive shock treatments, which she did on the unbelievable routine of twice a week for two years. Renee was not the same after her lengthy period of shock therapy, and exhibited severe symptoms of schizophrenia for the rest of her life.  After getting married and then giving birth to Jonathan, Renee was abandoned by her husband and was thrown into and out of mental hospitals. Jonathan was put into a foster home where he was beaten and molested, and by the age of 11 was put in the care of his grandparents.

            It was at the age of 11 that Caouette began to regularly make home movies on Super 8 and VHS. Taken by themselves, Caouette's home movies easily fall under Zimmerman's definition of 'auto-ethnographies': home movies that "position history as memory generated from the point of view of participants" (20). Many of them have an element of the subject performing for the camera. Two of the earliest home movies Caouette made are of him at eleven years old, dressed in women's clothing and giving improvised monologues from the perspective of an abused woman. Many of his home movies are clearly confessional and meant as pieces of video diary. In audio taken from a home movie or a tape recorder, Caouette, still a child, speaks of the abuse he experienced while in foster care and the molestation he experienced that he thinks has made him homosexual. For Caouette, his camera functions as both a diary and a mirror. In his home movies, he frequently adjusts his clothes and styles his hair while looking into the camera, and more than once literally exposes himself by displaying his private parts.

            At the U.S. government's 1993 hearings on film preservation, amateur film archivists testified that, "amateur film and home movies were often the only cinematic materials documenting and tracing regional history and minority voices" (Zimmerman, 11). Tarnation is very much the product of two minority voices. As a homosexual man with his own history of mental illness, Coauette used home movies throughout his life to document his struggle with understanding his homosexuality and dealing with his mental problems (Coauette was also hospitalized multiple times in his youth for psychotic episodes). His mother, Renee, is also a marginalized figure: a woman whose severe mental illness was exacerbated (if not created) by the shock treatments her parents forced her to have, abandoned by her husband, raped in front of her young son while hitchhiking, and has spent most of her life involuntarily put in state mental institutions. Through Coauette's home movies, both mother and son have had a chance to record and speak of their traumatic experiences.

            At the start of her essay, Zimmerman writes, "In the popular imaginary, home movies are often defined by negation: noncommercial, nonprofessional, unnecessary" (1). Coauette's home movies, both by themselves and taken as an organized whole in Tarnation, challenge the shallowness of this perspective. There is significant artistic depth to Coauette's home movies. One of the home movies shows a middle-aged Renee pretending to be a movie star while framed in a close-up. Renee speaks to the camera and in a warm Southern accent says she is Elizabeth Taylor's daughter. In the camcorder's tight close-up, she looks conventionally attractive and elegantly accessorized with earrings. When Renee finishes pretending to be Taylor's daughter, the camera zooms back and reveals her to be overweight and wearing an oversized sweatshirt with a cartoon animal on the front. Whether it was intentional or not, this home movie creates an artistic and revealing transition. In the close-up, Renee is pretty and her playing pretend seems fun and funny. When the camera pulls backward, she becomes shabby and her act of make believe seems more delusional and less harmless.

In addition to supporting the perspective that amateur films can provide a voice to minority and marginalized individuals and also explore multiple kinds of trauma, Tarnation ultimately shows that home movies can have commercial value. Caouette sent one of his home movies to the director John Cameron Mitchell as part of his audition tape for one of Mitchell's films. Mitchell was very impressed by the home movie, and upon seeing the completed Tarnation he and another established filmmaker, Gus van Sant, became executive producers on the film to help Coauette secure the rights to the songs he used throughout the picture. Edited and formed into Tarnation, Coauette's home movies did have commercial value. The film was a critical success (positively reviewed by influential critics including A.O. Scott, Roger Ebert, and Kenneth Turan) and enough of a commercial success (making over a million dollars in domestic and international box office)[2] to warrant a sequel: Walk Away Renee, which was released in 2011.

             

 

---

[1] Zimmerman, Patricia R. "The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts, Minings." In Mining The Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Ed. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. P. 1-28.

[2] "Tarnation: Theatrical Performance." The Numbers. Nash Information Services, n.d. Web. http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2004/TARNT.php

Home Movies, Anonymity, and Viewership

By Diana Bilbao

Having spent some time browsing the Home Movie collection of archive.org, I am becoming increasingly aware of the entirely different mode of viewership required by these films.  Ishizuka and Zimmerman write that "As dreamscapes condensing and displacing memory and history, home movies suggest a rethinking of and reorientation about which language and theoretical models are appropriate to decipher their syntax, grammar, codes, and production of knowledge" (18).  Indeed, watching them requires a recalibration of one's analytical thinking, as their very amateur nature and intent often cause them to operate on a different level and in a wholly different realm from traditional documentary.

Some home movies may have a narrative bent in their smaller vignettes, but they still require a great deal more deciphering than their nonfiction relatives.  One film I discovered, entitled Home Movie 97074: Iowa, 1942-1946, begins with a shot of a semi-circular canvas laid out on a grassy field.  Its edges are held down by stones, and it is painted with trees and shapes.  After a cut, animal shapes have been painted on.  Soon, a human is in the frame painting the canvas.  More people are shown painting in the following shots, with the low exposure on a sunny day creating an eerie, ominous look.  Eventually, a quick cut shows us that the canvas has become a teepee.  Once the teepee has been revealed, the film moves on to another vignette, sans explanation or resolution.

While the sequence in and of itself has a kind of goal to it - clearly, the desire was to document the process of teepee creation - the lack of voiceover, closeup, or titles prevents the viewer from fully understanding the action.  We do not know why the teepee is being constructed or who the participants are.  In fact, because of the low quality and exposure, we can barely see the faces of the people involved enough to differentiate them.  While this affects us on a viewing level, however, it was an irrelevant concern at the moment of the film's conception.  The filmmaker knows all this information because he or she is involved.  This marked difference in intent between home movies and other nonfiction film is what creates the unique viewing experience.  We as viewers are faced with a filmmaker who neither knows nor cares that we are watching.

The almost careless montage construction of home movies in general makes for a very active viewing experience.  The viewer is forced to engage with the film on an almost shot-by-shot basis.  After the teepee vignette, Iowa, 1942-1946 moves on to landscape shots, people at the beach, a deer walking slowly through tall grass, and other short, isolated moments.  For each one of these shots, the viewer must attempt to establish time, place, the participants, and the reason the person decided to shoot in the first place.

Another example of the kind of analysis necessary in home movies is a sequence from Home Movie 98752: Possibly in Connecticut.  This whimsically titled film is even less coherent than Iowa.  It begins with animals at the zoo, cuts to tourist shots of Washington, D.C., spends a minute at a college graduation, etc.  Eventually, however, it does begin to establish some sort of familiarity.  We start to see the same two dogs, the same baby, and the same children.  At this point, the viewer can begin to attempt to decipher the actual relationships between the figures onscreen, rather than the basic "what's happening?" Here, the film begins to have a slight semblance of a narrative through sheer consistency and visual quality.  This huge variation in accessibility is part of what requires such different analytical tools in approaching home movies. 

Rouch vs. Reichenbach: Cinema verite, direct cinema, and questions of distinction in methods of observation

In his memoir, Francois Reichenbach aligns himself with Ricky Leacock, criticizing the "psychoanalytic" cinema verité of Jean Rouch. I found this interesting, especially considering the similar francophone origins of Reichenbach and Rouch. While it does seem appropriate that Reichenbach, who was so fascinated with America, aligns himself with the Anglophone direct cinema filmmakers, there is some aspect to his work that seems subjective rather than objective documentary—especially considering the title of his film America as Seen by a Frenchman (1960).

Studying Rouch, I came to wonder what effect the pairing of sociology/anthropology with cinema has on cinema-based scholarly writing concerning Rouch—considering "The 'Dialogic Imagination' of Jean Rouch" as a case study. The anthropological frameworks that are detailed in the studies on Rouch, specifically revolving around the idea of ethnography, seem more geared towards anthropology and the study of human beings rather than the study of cinema. Perhaps this is appropriate as Rouch was first an anthropologist and secondly a filmmaker. It is also possible that taking on such a large amount of information—including indigenous populations on camera, criticisms, documentary, and cinema—has found the ethnographic components of Rouch's work more important to foreground than simply their documentary-like form. While his films are important, they are hardly the first ethnographic films (as detailed in Heider's "A Hisotry of Ethnographic Film").

In considering Diane Scheinman's essay, my first questions arise in how exactly the dialogic is obtained through cinema verité and how this is new and different from a more objective, observational direct cinema. Scheinman quotes Baktin's idea that "A word, discourse, language or culture undergoes 'dialogization' when it becomes relativeized, de-priviledged, aware of competing definitions for the same things.[1]" This idea pertains to the 1960s era of decolonization in France that followed the problematic war in Algeria. The center / perhiphery relationship between France and its former colonies allowed Rouch to obtain this force of dialogism in his films. If there were not competing definitions of culture, there would be no discussion of dialogism. It is possible that the simple mechanism of a camera, whose history is so strong in France beginning with the Lumiere brothers in 1895, presents this dialogism even before any political issues of decolonization present themselves. More strongly stressed in Scheinman's essay however, is the idea of Eurocentrism working in contrast to native African cultures.

"As in his subsequent films, in Les maitres fous Rouch is concerned with the psychological impact of colonialism on indigenous populations and with the adaptive responses such cultural contact occasions" (192). This psychological impact works in Rouch's new de-eurocentrising developments in anthropology. Manifesting in films, this mix of redefining the study of anthropology mixes with defining a subgenre of cinema verite in the field of documentary is a dual development, but perhaps mixes issues of documentary with anthropology. This mixing in turn creates a converged medium of anthro-documentary that cannot be studied simply through cinema or simply through anthropology. Similar problems present themselves in other combinations of anthropological/sociological/cultural studies with film studies, highlighted by Willemen in his discussion on national cinemas: "the issues of the national and the international, and indeed of the colonial and the imperial, are present in film studies in specific ways that are different from those adopted, for instance, in anthropology or in comparative literature."[2] Willemen presents theoretical problems that there is not adequate time to consider in this brief essay. However, in keeping with this idea of a problematic consideration of anthropology within film studies or film studies within anthropology, I find it necessary to consider Rouch's filmmaking carefully. (This is perhaps analogous to the way in which Francois Truffaut is said to have called Night and Fog a meditation rather than a documentary in Van der Knaap's book).

At this point, I find it important to note that while Rouch worked closely with indigenous cultures in Africa, he was also concerned with western culture, as detailed in his focus on Paris in Chronicle of a Summer (1961). His multicultural focus in Chronicle is similar to the multicultural depictions of America in Reichenbach's films. However, in Chronique, there is a distinct psychoanalytic, "meta" study of cinema that does not exist in direct cinema filmmaking. Rouch, at the end of his film Chronique, acknowledges that there is an idea that the presence of a camera has an effect on people's action and continues to interrogate his subjects on their actions in front of a camera. While considering these more sociological effects of performance, Rouch was also considering the multicultural atmosphere of 1960s Paris. In mixing the two, his film becomes an ethnographic study of western culture. But it also studies the medium of cinema in an at once connected but distinct genre of study. Considering this mixing, we might apply the theory of dialogism in the teaching of Jean Rouch's films. While weighing upon the field of anthropology and presenting a new "shared" anthropology, Rouch mixes his fieldwork in anthropology with his own studies of cinema (in a meta-study of performance styles, effect of music on image, etc). This might be contrast against direct cinema filmmakers who took on fly-on-the-wall observational styles that were subjective in terms of where and how the filmmakers used their cameras but objective in terms of psychological analysis.

Curiously, the film careers of Rouch and Reichenbach began the same—at least in relation to sound. As detailed in Scheinman's essay on Rouch[3] and in a short biographical note on Reichenbach[4], both directors were disturbed by the addition of sound to their first silent films (which both had negative reactions from audiences who saw them first without sound), holding faith in image more than with music or words. However, finding added sound problematic, Rouch turned to synchronous sound while Reichenbach turned towards essayistic tendencies, presenting his "French," narrated perspective on a situation rather than an observational synchronity that occurred with synchronous sound. (Admittedly, self-identification with national cultures is another theoretical problem that there is no time for in this essay—but an important concept to take note of.) Curiously, the acknowledged subjectivity of music and "perspective" of Reichenbach's work present a study that is different from both direct cinema and Rouch's cinema verité. While Rouch's subjects are studied on film as creatures of their society, Reichenbach himself is the subject of study when considering anthropological approaches to his film.  The idea that "the camera is never a neutral presence, but one that prompts constructions of 'reality' by those on whom it is turned[5]" might apply to both filmmakers, but in different layers of their own cinema.

-- Carrie Reese

---

[1] Dialogic 427 in Scheinman, Diane. "The 'Dialogic Imagination' of Jean Rouch: Covert Conversations in Les maitres fous." Documenting the Documentary. Eds. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998. Pp. 188-203.

[2] Willemen, Paul. "The National Revisited." Theorising National Cinema. Ed. Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen. British Film Institute, 2008. Page 31

[3]Scheinman, 201

[4] Widhoff, Francoise. « Francois Reichenbach Vu par Francoise Widhoff. » Pamphlet. Francois Reichenbach : Hommage, Volume 2. DVD-PAL (Zone 2). BQHL Distribution. Page 5

[5] Scheinman, 194

Conference & Screenings | "Re-Enactments of 1917 in Film"

Reenactment [reenactment] 
is sometimes conceived of as anathema to nonfiction. 

But there's no getting around the fact that forms of reenacting (or enacting or dramatizing) past events have always been part of nonfiction film and documentary forms. From the Reproduction of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (Lubin, 1897) to The Passion Play at Oberammergau (1898); from Nanook building his igloo to Gerald L. K. Smith playing himself in a 1937 March of Time newsreel; from Errol Morris shooting in-studio dramatizations of the murder of a Dallas police officer in The Thin Blue Line (1987) to Philippe Petit revisiting his own 1974 tight-rope walk between the World Trade Center twin towers in the great documentary Man on a Wire (2008). 

This "Re-Enactments of 1917 in Film" conference brings some quite rare film material to the fore. [see announcement below from NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia -- http://jordanrussiacenter.org/event/re-enactments-of-1917-in-film/ ]  

On October 26 this year, the Museum of Modern Art screened two re-united pieces of footage (from Swedish and Russian sources) documenting the Soviets' 1920 spectacular ritual re-staging of the October Revolution of 1917. Never a film release per se, the very officially commissioned film recorded a giant outdoor stage event. [Zizek wrote about it: "A Plea for Leninist Intolerance," Critical Inquiry (Winter 2002): http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/a-plea-for-leninist-intolerance.]

On the site where the historical events occurred three years earlier, a team of directors, actors, and extras mounted a pageant in Petrograd in which Reds and Whites vied for the space outside of the Winter Palace (of the deposed czar). A few thousand people played roles in the production, witnessed by some 100,000 others. 

The Storming reenactment of 1920 took place at night (like the events of 1917). Therefore, all the FILMED actions had to be shot during the daytime REHEARSAL for the reenactment (except the evening fireworks).

Here are a few snapshots I took of the MoMA screen during scholar Yuri Tsivian's slide show before the film screening last month. 

(1) drawing (aerial view) of the Winter Palace "set" (1920)

___________________________________________________________________________________________

(2) The Women's Battalion of Death! (see Kristen Harper's posting -- http://nonfictionfilmhistory.blogspot.com/2013/09/women-in-non-fiction-war-films.html )

(3)  Actor of 1920 playing General Kerensky, the Russian provisional government Prime Minister of 1917. (The Keaton resemblance must be coincidental, since Buster was only just emerging as a film star in '20.)
______________________________________________________________________________

(4) Fireworks [!] ended the 1920 spectacle!  Here's a film frame enlargement of same.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

CONFERENCE:
Re-Enactments of 1917 in Film

Co-sponsored by NYU Department of Comparative Literature 

and Department of Cinema Studies. 

When thinking about the October Revolution we habitually imagine a single event with far-reaching historical consequences. We sometimes forget that history does not follow nature’s laws of causality but rather was an interaction between revolutionary technologies, incremental changes in knowledge, and necessary politico-economical development, which themselve have stirred up European societies since Modernity. Furthermore, we are seldom cognisant of the role media has played in the telling, writing, showing and conception thereof. Living in post-historical times, we need to give new meaning to the events and dates we are inheriting from European History (writ large.) 

This conference focuses on a radical form of “historical imagination” (Hayden White) as exemplified by the October Revolution. Our aim is to describe how the multi-layered process of historical change was modeled by the classical arts of literature or theater and by the new media, such as cinema, into a special kind of event. How did it happen that we have come to associate this complex process solely with the storming of the Winter Palace on October 25th in 1917?  

uncredited photo from the conference website.

Die Deutsche Wochenschau No. 747 and the Late World War II Nazi Aesthetic

"Die Deutsche Wochenschau No. 747 and the Late World War II Nazi Aesthetic" by Roger Mancusi

Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MspubzeKr4  

Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SQZ97QAlnY

Through the help of Dr. Streibel and his colleague Jeanpaul Goergen, we have positively identified the Nazi newsreel footage that I screened for class as being Die Deutsche Wochenschau No. 747.  The German Weekly Review (Die Deutsche Wochenschau) news service, distributed by Tobis Films, used a combination of field footage of military offenses, updates from the home front, and interactive maps to display Nazi campaigns across the world to the German people.  The footage in my selected piece, which passed censors on January 4, 1945, captures the Nazi Ardennes Offensive, and as discussed in class it selectively portrays the Nazi advances and neglects to show their eventual retreat and defeat in the Battle of the Bulge (Hoffmann 233).

Beyond simply depicting or ignoring the battle’s factual details and realities, the newsreel employs various cinematic maneuvers to sell the political rhetoric Nazi authorities were brandishing during the collapse of the Western Front.  To give context, in various speeches made in late 1944 and early 1945, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels began to change their wartime rhetoric from reasons to fight to reasons to defend.  When earlier they proclaimed German superiority as the reason to overcome their European neighbors, now they chose to describe the intensity with which Nazi forces were meeting the Allied and Soviet advances (Barnouw 144). Despite reports of Nazi losses and surrenders abounding the Western and Eastern Fronts, the Nazi regime claimed victories and insisted that every enemy attack was being met head on with violent and bloodthirsty determination.  Simultaneously, they stressed the importance of a unified home front to support and believe in the forces that were fighting off the invaders. Die Deutsche Wochenschau No. 747 encompasses both the stubborn rhetoric of the collapsing Nazi regime and the cinematic qualities necessary to sell the ideal of the valiant and successful Nazi soldier to the nervous German public.  

As Die Deutsche Wochenschau No. 747 begins, as was custom for newsreels, we are given a time and a place for the action we are about to see unfold: The 16^th of December, 1945 in the Ardennes Region of Luxembourg and Belgium.  Following these establishing shots, we are bombarded (to borrow the term) with close ups of rockets streaking through the night sky and Nazi artillery unleashing their shells on unsuspecting Allied forces.  The narrator, Harry Giese,  adds the verbal commentary to these images to accurately portray the impact of the initial Nazi attacks, and the dramatic soundtrack builds the tension while German forces await the signal to advance. ¹  Once the word is given, the soldiers advance to surprise stunned American soldiers, and the camera follows the columns of Nazis into the “enemy villages” while captured American POWs stream in the opposite direction. 

Within the next sequence’s display of American wreckage, we see the camera and narrator’s ability, or at least attempt, to subvert what they believe were Allied war claims.  The camera closes in on the side of a destroyed American tank with the phrase “AMERICA FIRST” painted on it, and the narrator claims: “America First? We’ll see about that!” [Image 1].  Whether or not the irony and humor of “America First” being painted on a Sherman tank was wasted on the Germans is unknown, but regardless, the newsreel takes this to be a claim of American dominance and shows the viewer how Allied claims only lead to dead Americans at the hands of the superior Nazi forces. The German soldiers, as argued by the footage, were made to look superior in all aspects of the battle, and according to the narrator, each Nazi maneuver caught the Allies off guard.  The bodies and wreckage they leave in their wake attests to that, and the cascade of images of German shells falling, German tanks advancing, and Allied forces crumbling only further those claims.  

As the second installment of the newsreel (Part 2) begins, we are shown the Nazi’s superiority in the air to accompany their overpowering forces on the ground.  Before the action takes to the sky, the camera again works to undo American wartime ideologies.  In Image 2, The American Dream, a long held national ethos was shown to be untrue as a Nazi soldier tauntingly paints the expression on one of the many destroyed American guns.  To back up the Nazi ideological claims of superiority, the narrator comments derisively, “The American Dream. This says it all!”.  Clearly, according to this newsreel, the Allied forces have no match for Nazi firepower and cunning, and soon the Luftwaffe will take to the skies to continue the display of military might.  

 The Allied air forces, which we know actually turned the tide on the Ardennes offensive, are here shown to be cannon fodder for the Luftwaffe.  Nazi fighter-planes take off and attack before American bombers can even get off the ground, leaving them in a trail of smoke.  And once American bombers are in the sky, we find them unprotected and they are easily shot down by the Nazi fighter planes attacking from above. In the first series of what I believe are shots added in postproduction, the spectator (read: the German citizen) is invited to participate in the shooting down of sluggish American bombers.  After showing the organization of German planes flying in formation, the camera cuts to a close up of a fighter pilot looking down [Image 3] to show his gun control [Image 4] in a point of view shot.  The camera cuts to the propeller spurning the plane forward before cutting to another POV shot: the plane unleashing fire and downing an American plane.   When American fighters come to engage the Luftwaffe, they too are easily shot down in an eyeline match with the pilot [Image 5].  The audience is invited to not only enjoy in this ritualistic and systematic destruction of American forces, but also to actively feel like they are an engaged participant in the battle.  Hitler and Goebbels stressed the unity of the home front and battlefront was crucial to repel the invading Allied forces, and these series of point of view shots shows the German citizen why they should still believe in the war efforts.  The newsreel fades to black and we are led to believe that the German's were victories on all accounts of the battle.   

 In reality, German forces were being beaten back in such numbers that on January 7, 1945, only three days after Die Deutsche Wochenschau No. 747 was sent to press, Hitler ordered for the complete evacuation of Nazi forces from the Ardennes Region into the German northwest.  This newsreel, however, stresses and manipulates the initial Nazi forces' successes (mainly between mid to late December), but refuses to show the Nazi retreat from Christmas through the New Year.  It upholds the virtues and ideals that the Nazi regime would have had the public believe and refuses to participate in the breakdown of their proud beliefs.  The images and voice-over act to soothe the growing anxieties of the closing months of World War II in Germany, and the hyperbolic and nationalistic rhetoric that catapulted the nation, and the world, into war years ago is here alive and well.  It is only when you dig beneath these twisted and propagandistic images that the true nature is revealed.  The Ardennes Offensive would prove to be Hitler's last desperate attack to protect the nation he led to believe was universally superior to the rest of the world.  After the Battle of the Bulge, having been overexposed, under-equipped, and truly defeated, the German forces continued their retreat into the heart of Germany, only to fall to the Allied and Russian forces some five months later.

 Works Cited:

Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 

Hoffman, Hilmar. The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism 1933-1945,  Frankfurt: Berghahn Books, 1996.

Note:
1.  Dr. Kathrin Bower explained that Harry Giese was the narrator in a personal correspondence.