Brussels Sprouts

In case anyone was curious about what Professor Streible meant by his reference to "Brussels sprouts," while we were discussing the state of academic publishing and so forth, you can follow this link to my 5 seconds of fame, or shame. (You have to watch the whole thing and not blink around 3 minutes and 40 seconds.)

Carr, for those of you who don't follow the arts and business reporting in the Times, is a media industries columnist who does a regular column called "The Carpetbagger," which follows awards show hysteria. His jibe (which I think is kind of funny, actually) isn't that far from what people say about writing on documentary when they're being more charitable: the pull quote from a positive review which now appears with the Amazon listing describes it as a "sobering reappraisal of documentary film," which I'm pretty sure is meant to be praise, but sounds a bit like "it's not fun, but at least it goes over things we already know." This is an echo of Bill Nichols's now-famous phrase (in Representing Reality) describing documentary as participating in the "discourses of sobriety."

Just for the record, I think Streible's book is excellent. And it's got a blurb by none other than Martin Scorsese, who knows something about Fight Pictures.

"Objective" Newsreel & the Discourse of Journalism

Last week, we went over a few topics in dealing with newsreel, fabrication, construction, and artistry. So, we learned that newsreel wasn't quite as mechanically produced "raw" materials. Indeed, in some cases, it possesses a tone, an "accent" toward a particular intellectual and emotional response from the audience. I wonder to what extend the evolution of newsreel were affected by the purportedly "objective" journalism that came to be defined as a result of a similar procedure that formed Movietone products? Here I am referring to the evolution of journalism through which the need to produce news that could be catered to various political views hence available for purchase across the political spectrum. 

hadi

Avant-Garde Film

This sounds silly but I am really studying Avant-Garde film for the
first time and I am intrigued by the statements in the reading that
take a stance on content and subject matter of film.

I always considered the term Avant-Garde in narrow terms, or defined
in terms of filming technique strictly. I never considered that the
Avant-Garde subject matter and treatment of subject involved in such
high notions of social importance and portrayal of reality.

Personally up until now I considered most Avant-Garde film full of hot
air with touching moments between people pushed by editing and camera
technique. I never considered it as trying to fill an important gap
that Hollywood creates as it pursues giant blockbusters and ignores
"life," "reality," "fact" or the "actual," borrowing terms that
Vertov, Grierson, Rotha, Wolfe and many other use.

Mostly "Notes on the Avant-garde Documentary Film" by Ivens and "The
Revolutionary Film - Next Step" by Hurwitz gave me this
interpretation. I would like to comment that in regards to Hurwitz,
his fatalistic vision of the masses leads me to view his work as
lacking any inherit truth - since I disagree strongly with his views.
His nihilism makes his arguments for a separate class of avant-garde
film seem elitist. Existentially he falls into a the category of
Fascist, and calls for revolution but fails to see the nuance between
rebellion and revolution.

The Rebel = good, Revolution often turns into fascism.

And as soon as I learn to comment on others post you will hear more
from me!

Aaron Howell
agh247@nyu.edu

(Left) Newsreel, cont'd

A few dangling threads, one or two of which will be picked up next class…

I think that a few of the questions that were being posed at the very end of class – about the pragmatics of Workers Film and Photo League newsreel production, circulation, and screening – might be answered by Russell Campbell's 1977 essay for the leftish film history/theory journal Jump Cut, which has put much of its back catalogue online. Campbell is the author of the best study of the WFPL; this article is a very abbreviated version of a longer study, which is required reading for anyone who wants to know more about the WFPL. (I think it's better than William Alexander's more-frequently-used FILM ON THE LEFT, which is an oral history of left documentary in the U.S. during the 1930s.)

If you blink, you'll miss an important point that Campbell makes: some of the WFPLers worked in the commercial newsreel industry. This pragmatic detail underscores something we noted frequently today: that the sharp opposition historians might like to draw between "mainstream" and "alternative" nonfiction traditions and practices, whether you measure those differences formally, politically, or otherwise, breaks down somewhat when one starts examining the "opposing" sides more closely. The point here might be less that there's no difference between a Movietone newsreel promoting the latest entertainment product from Hollywood and a WFPL newsreel promoting proletarian revolution – and of course there is a big difference at the level of "content"– and more that it's harder than one might think to generalize about those differences, and to make those generalizations stick to any aspect of the material the film historian looks at: the style of the camerawork; the lists of personnel; the audiences who went to one newsreel or another… (A case in point: the endless, excruciating debates in the Soviet Union about whether Vertov's experimental technique is in line with Marxist-Leninist theory or not; although he looks to us today like the very model of the political/artistic avant-gardist, many of his fellow revolutionary artists had no trouble calling him a "formalist," by which they meant a political reactionary.)

Another point to make here – a kind of historiographic, or meta-historiographic one – is whether a tradition or a form can contain its opposite and still be that thing. The Burkhardt film we saw at the beginning of class, for instance, which turns Manhattan into a "strange" place: is that a travelogue, or a parody of a travelogue; and what would be the difference? Is a newsreel that shows what the commercial newsreels won't show still a newsreel? (Pundits are fond of asking this question about The Daily Show.)

One could also ask it of the present-day organization Labor Beat, which one might see as following in the footsteps of the WFPL. Based in Chicago (like many important developments in American liberal and left documentary), Labor Beat disseminates information about workers' and others' efforts for social justice; the short video programs they produce have the size and shape of a newsreel. But are they newsreels? Or short documentary films? (If you look at the site, you can see that Labor Beat is aware of this historical resonance…) It might seem like a trivial distinction. But imagine that you are Raymond Fielding, updating your book for the third time. Do you count this kind of work in or out of the tradition?

jk