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)

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

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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. 

Documentary Modernism and the Sponsored Film

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The Confluence of Documentary Modernism and the Sponsored Film

            Upon watching Master Hands for our week on sponsored films, I was struck by an unexpected connection.  In its construction and aesthetic, the film very much resembles the mode of documentary modernism exemplified by Man With a Movie Camera and laid out polemically in Jors Ivens' "The Artistic Power of the Documentary Film" (1932).  Ivens rails against the industry element of commercial narrative cinema, asserting that it "made incorrect use of your technical and scientific work and created a sort of 'art inflation'" (Bakker 227).  As he goes on to describe the components that distinguish "artistic" documentary film, however, he lists traits that can be easily found in Master Hands, despite it being sponsored by Chevrolet. 

            Ivens strongly emphasizes the notion of "cinematographic rhythm" and its importance to the artistry of the medium.  By rhythm, he primarily means editing and the sense of flow and tempo created by putting images together, the essential factor which distinguishes film from other art forms.  He cites the development of sound as "an excellent ally" in creating the desired rhythm for a film. 

            Ivens' principles can be clearly applied to Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera, with its abstract cutting between objects of industry and urbanites on the move.  The connection to Master Hands, however, is more surprising, as the sponsored film is even farther removed from what Ivens seems to want.  Master Hands is almost entirely made up of shots of machinery, sometimes operated by workers, but it is the machinery which is most important.  Although in theory, the film depicts the construction of an automobile, instead of employing a voiceover or titles for clarity of the process, it relies on avant-garde techniques to create a more fluid, impressionistic picture of the industry.  A more clear explanation of the process is provided in Prelinger's shotlist (http://archive.org/details/MasterHa1936_2), but for a civilian watching the film the mechanics are quite unclear, and the film quickly takes on a more avant-garde feel as the viewer settles into the Wagnerian music and the repetitive, mechanistic visuals. 

            The Prelinger notes describe the style of Master Hands as "capitalist realism" that "uses the representational methods of the Soviet and German cinemas to strengthen its vision of American enterprise."  I find this confluence and cross-pollination fascinating, as the two documentary genres are philosophically so far removed from each other.  Master Hands pretends to be about the auto workers who build its products, but the shots chosen are primarily of the machinery, therefore glorifying the corporation itself rather than the human laborers.  As a sponsored film, it is by definition the opposite of what Jors Ivens espouses in his treatise, but employs all the same techniques. 

            Master Hands therefore both proves and disproves Ivens's point.  It does indeed co-opt the techniques of the avant-garde to serve its own ends, amounting to the "art inflation" Ivens describes.  It does so, however, in a documentary mode without a scripted narrative, indicating that documentary film does not necessarily have the purity of purpose he ascribes it.  Ivens writes that, in documentary, "It is not a series of external ideas, but the objects themselves which indicate their sequence in place and time" (Bakken 228).  I would argue that both can be true in the documentary film.  Indeed, most documentaries are built around thematic, polemical ideas as well as the dictates of the sounds and images.  Master Hands is an example, as is Man With a Movie Camera, though the former has a more commercial ideological bent than the latter. 

            Just through the comparison of these two subgenres of documentary – the sponsored film and documentary modernism – we can see the murkiness of the boundaries of nonfiction film.  Truth and ideology, artistry and corporate ambition all blur together.  Delineating what is pure and what is mediated and for what reasons becomes a complex endeavor.  Is there such a thing as a nonfiction film, when editing and mediation are at play? 

Diana Bilbao

Bernstein and Ebert on 'Roger and Me'

Aden Jordan 

"There was a startling vehemence to the journalistic critics' denunciation of Roger & Me (1989), Michael Moore's insightful and bitingly funny expose of corporate greed in the 1980s…The controversy demonstrated how difficult certain journalists find conceptualizing the documentary film…Unlike the journalistic discourse, academic discussion has acknowledged that defining the documentary is difficult, whether documentary is understood in terms of its formal features, its assumptions about the construction of knowledge, its assertions of authority, the experience it evokes in the audience–or all of the above."[1] (Bernstein, 397-398)

In his essay "Documentaphobia and Mixed Modes: Michael Moore's Roger & Me", Matthew Bernstein uses the angry reaction of some critics to Michael Moore's Roger & Me as a starting point in his argument that there has been more discourse on the different and complex modes of the documentary in the academic world than in the journalistic field. Some critics were outraged by the ways that Moore played loosely and deceptively with the facts in his film, including his decision to arrange events he covered in Roger & Me out of order as a means of further strengthening his portrayal of how the corporate greed of General Motors and their decision to close an automobile plant in Flint, Michigan affected their laid-off employees and damaged their community. Bernstein argues that these critics were still under the impression that there is a rigid and single kind of documentary.  He posits that the critics did not see Roger & Me as fitting proper documentary format, and that these critics were unaware of the different modes that documentaries can fall into.

Using the four documentary modes defined by Bill Nichols, Bernstein classifies Roger & Me as a documentary that falls into the interactive and expository modes. Moore's film is interactive because Moore puts himself in front of the camera and uses his authorial voice to inform us that we are hearing his opinions. According to Bernstein, "Roger & Me establishes itself in its opening moments–in what theorists call the primacy effect (cf. Bordwell 37)–as an interactive documentary, one which relies heavily on subject interviews and the filmmaker's openly acknowledged and limited understanding" (Bernstein 401). Bernstein describes the film as being a hybrid of the interactive mode and the expository mode because "after the film's prologue, Moore settles into the expository mode of documentary, whereby his apparently objective narration asserts its absolute authority" (402). One of way of understanding the film as a hybrid of these two modes is to consider that through the interactive mode Moore asks questions inRoger & Me and through the expository mode he answers these questions himself without leaving room for "ambiguity in terms of the audience's interpretation of the people, places, and events they see" (402).

While I'm in complete agreement with Bernstein's arguments regarding how the nonfiction features of Moore's film were received differently by critics and academics, I found it curious that Bernstein waited until the last paragraph of his essay to mention that there were critics who were not in opposition to some of Moore's manipulation tactics within the film. According to Bernstein, "Some critics have defended Moore's film on the grounds that the considerations like those I have raised above about Roger & Me should not outweigh Moore's achievement in demonstrating vividly and humorously corporate America's indifference to the welfare of the communities in which it operates" (412). Throughout his essay, Bernstein used direct quotes from the critics who denounced Moore and his film including Pauline Kael, Richard Schickel, and Harlan Jacobson, but he neglected to include any quotes from critics who did support the film despite Moore's manipulations. In this last paragraph, Bernstein does parenthetically reference Miles Orvell's essay "Documentary Film and the Power of Interrogation: American Dreamand Roger & Me", in which Orvell does acknowledge the film's "hybridization of forms"[2] (Orvell, 134) and Nichols's four modes of documentary. Orvell's essay originally appeared in Film Quarterly, an academic journal, and this further supports Bernstein's claim that the film academics could distinguish between different kinds of documentaries better than film critics.

Roger & Me was a very popular documentary at the time of its release, and I was personally interested in trying to find reviews or articles on Roger & Me by journalistic critics who did have some awareness of the different methods that documentaries utilize, whether they were the specific four modes outlined by Nichols or other approaches. One of the film's more popular (or populist) defenders was Roger Ebert, who did not use the modes of documentary utilized by Bernstein and Nichols, but instead classified Roger & Me as a type of documentary satire in his article "Attacks on 'Roger & Me' Completely Miss Point of Film"[3]. Ebert wrote that by using manipulation in his film Moore "was taking the liberties that satirists and ironists have taken with material for generations, and he was making his point with sarcasm and deft timing". For his article, Ebert spoke with other documentary filmmakers including Werner Herzog's cinematographer Ed Lachman, documentary director Karen Thorsen, and Pumping Iron director George Butler. Ebert writes, "if they all had one point in common, it was this one: There is no such thing as a truly objective, factual documentary". Unlike Kael, Schickel, and Jacobson, Ebert did not have a problem with Moore's more exploitative use of chronology in Roger & Me and could appreciate the documentary as a satire, but he still displayed what Bernstein refers to as 'documentaphobia' by saying that he wouldn't be interested in going to Roger & Me "for a factual analysis of GM and Flint". While Ebert may have shown a more open mind towards the complex methods of the documentary by classifying Roger & Me as a documentary satire, he still displayed the same fear of the in-depth, fact-centered 'three hour movie' that Moore said he wanted to avoid creating because it would bore viewers.

While I do agree with Bernstein that some critics received Roger & Me more negatively than scholars because the two groups had differing classifications for the documentary, I still find the views of the critics who dismissed the film's manipulations to be valid. No documentary is objective, and the truth itself is always elusive and hard to grasp even for filmmakers who aim for objectivity. Even with that in mind, Moore's film is sensationalistic and he purposefully withheld certain information in his film to appeal to viewers' emotions. It's important to note that Bernstein refers to the critics who denounced the movie as journalists. In journalism, where sensationalism is frowned upon, journalists certainly value information integrity. However, that integrity is damaged when information is presented misleadingly. I think that to constructively assess any documentary film we need to be able to accept that there is no completely objective nonfiction film while also holding filmmakers accountable for the information they spread.

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[1] Bernstein, Matthew. "Documentaphobia and Mixed Modes." Documenting the Documentary. Ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. P. 397-415.

[2] Orvell, Miles. "Documentary Film and the Power of Interrogation." Michael Moore: Filmmaker, Newsmaker, Cultural Icon. Ed. Matthew H. Bernstein. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. P. 127-140.

[3] Ebert, Roger. "Attacks on 'Roger & Me' Completely Miss Point of Film."The Chicago Sun-Times. 11 Feb. 1990. (also available at RogerEbert.com)