Bryan Fox, May 1998 (http://wso.williams.edu/~bfox/df) “Works of art are nothing but simple facts” - Emile Zola, 1867 “My world is packaged for me; I just have to consume” -Synthetic Pleasures, 1996 Introduction. We have become increasingly immersed in a culture of images and synthetic experiences which serve to substitute the visual sign or streaming bits of information for a physical reality. Virtual Reality systems, telecommunications, telecommuting, and cyberspace relations are all symptoms of this phenomenon. In VR, experiences are reduced to perceptions fed from an artificial source and reality is primarily defined by the processing of visual information. Documentary film often operates on these same levels, functioning as a representational or ethnographic camera obscura which filters reality into a readily accessible two-dimensional medium. The camera acts as a filter for history in much the same way it discovers a visual reality of the present. No matter how close Abraham Zapruder’s footage of the Kennedy assassination seems to bring us to the reality of the historical event, we are still separated from its historical truth behind the safety of the camera lens. The historical event is immutably frozen in the past, unable to be located except through representation (Linda Williams). Most people’s experience of the Kennedy assassination have come from a television screen illuminating their living rooms rather than from the sunlit streets of Dealey Plaza. (JPEG / QT clip) The Eternal Frame, 1976 - -- sec. In Eternal Frame, the Ant Farm Collective recreated the assassination of President Kennedy as captured by the Zapruder footage. They then interviewed witnesses of the depiction to find out what they thought of it. Some were appalled, others were deeply moved, but all seemed to judge the reality of the physical representation in terms of Zapruder’s visual evidence of the assassination, which they held to be reality itself. In the words of Walter Benjamin, the “aura” surrounding the unpossessible historical event decays as the reality of the visual representation replaces the physical reality of the historical event. To dismiss the strong emotions invested in the event as an “unreal” experience based in film rather than in one’s physical presence at the event does not explain how film has essentially transformed perceptions of this historical event. Although relatively few people were actually present, film served as a substitute reality for the American public which (years later) may have been as real an experience as witnessing the event itself. The Zapruder footage may function in a similar manner to memory - the event is recalled through fragmented and unclear visual and aural evidence. Film inscribes the visual information of the event in its viewers eyes, creating a memory of the event based on the filmic representation rather than the actual experience. Recognizing that the historical referent is located in the past, the documentary’s ability to present visual evidence of the historical event while maintaining and even propagating a barrier between the audience and the event brings it close to the realm of ethnography. Films such as Oliver Stone’s JFK, Harun Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989) and John Blair’s Anne Frank Remembered all operate as discourses on a historical referent between a filmmaker and audience who are both removed from the social and political contexts which surrounded the original event. Historical fact is treated as the Other and we are placed in a position to judge the Other from our frame of reference. The Kennedy assassination and the Holocaust are perhaps two of the most socially charged events for Americans in the twentieth century. Each event possesses an aura because of our distance from the event. Despite attempts to document, represent, and understand these histories, these events occupy the place of the Other in relation to our current cultural framework. Many filmmakers have gone beyond this to question the impacts that a historical event can have on our present existence. Although the physical referent of the Holocaust is isolated in its own time and place, the ramifications of its history persist outside of the Other in our own culture. Errol Morris, in The Thin Blue Line and his rough-cut Mr. Death / Fred Leuchter, raises questions of the impact of the past on the present and, more interestingly, how film works into this dialectic. If we recognize the importance that the visual image has in reconstructing a past reality and feeding our knowledge of the Other, then we must also see the power of film to subsequently influence our immediate present. The representational qualities of film begin to question the extent that historical past exists as part of our physical reality. I. Historical Event as the Other - the JFK Assassination Documentaries such as Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North which distinctly extend into ethnographic representation traditionally approach their subject as the Other. The dichotomy between the cultures of Flaherty and Nanook is emphasized and the relationship quickly becomes hierarchical. One of the most satisfying things about watching Nanook is that we as an audience are put in the place of explorers or investigators, assuming one of the roles of the filmmaker (Barnouw 40). Flaherty signals us when Nanook is almost finished building an igloo, and we then discover the final step is to carve a window out of its wall. Flaherty also underscores the differences between us and him (the self and Other) when he prompts Nanook to act like he is utterly taken aback by the presence of a phonograph, when in fact he has already been accustomed to movie cameras for months. Nanook’s place in the film is defined by his relationships to Flaherty and consequently to the film’s audience. He is explained by being set apart from our culture; Nanook is a discourse of the Other between Flaherty and ourselves rather than a self-defining statement by Nanook (Nichols, Representing Reality). Historical representation in film traditionally functions in the same way that Flaherty’s ethnography does. Both ethnographic and historical film propose to erase some of the obvious boundaries between the audience and the subject (the Other) by providing information to illuminate the Other. JFK frames the historical event in a narrative structure with which we are comfortable from our exposure to mainstream fiction films. In this film, historic fact becomes increasingly confused and commingled with the fictive elements of the plot. Throughout the movie, documentary footage of the assassination and the autopsy is interspersed with staged reproductions. (JPEGs of actor and real side by side) The desire to physically illuminate the Other does not, however, bring us any closer to it. The film’s apparent erasure of boundaries between the viewer and historical event is a myth, an effect of the investigative style of film making. Although the setting of JFK places its hypothesis in the years shortly after the assassination, the arguments presented by the movie are more reflective of Stone’s position in a cultural and political context now well removed from that of 1963. The historical event is treated from the point of view of the present (The historian has the benefit of retrospect) and is presented in our terms rather than its own. Thus, relationships that begin to appear between the viewer and the Other, the historical event, are a construction of the filmmaker’s creative process. For example, when watching Kevin Costner unraveling the mysteries before us, we sense that we are a part of this history unfolding. In the final courtroom scene, at some level we become a part of the jury - set up by Costner’s speech (directed more to us in order to advance the plot than to the jury) and by cinematographic techniques such as point of view shots which visually put us in the jury box. (JPEG) We are not put in the position to judge Clay Shaw, however. If anything is on trial in the closing 40 minutes of this film, it is Stone’s conspiracy theory which must withstand our scrutiny. Still, Stone actively involves us in the narrative of the film and in the reconstruction of history through his paranoid cinematographic techniques. But despite these fabricated relationships between audience and film, we are really no closer to the historical event than we are to Nanook and his “family” (who were essentially actors unrelated to him). The inconspicuous separation of Self and Other is also paradoxically fed by our repeated exposure to images of the event, whether historical document or fictive creations. Well into Costner’s closing statements to the jury, he plays the Zapruder footage for the jury that we have already seen again and again. This time, the climax of the action - when the final bullet strikes Kennedy in the head - is replayed several times under the actor’s synchronized incantation, “Back and to the left…” (JPEG / QT clip) We are forced to confront this arresting sequence which simultaneously repulses us and yet makes us more familiar with the image. Costner’s (and Stone’s) intent seems to be that this exposure/illumination will bring us closer to an understanding of the truth. This effect is entirely cinematic, however. The film now becomes fictive on more than one level: Costner has edited and manipulated the footage in order to play that two-second sequence repeatedly. On top of this, Stone has interspersed his fabricated clips with the Zapruder footage. The fictive cinematic effect is, of course, performed more for the viewer of JFK than for a viewer in the courtroom. Instead of arriving at a convincing understanding of what happened, we are left with a fictional monologue about the distanced Other. Throughout the movie, and particularly in this climax, JFK conflates the historical event of the Kennedy assassination and the historical evidence of the event. The aura of the event is destroyed by this mechanical reproduction and repetition, and historical reality becomes embodied in the filmic simulation itself. Thinking of cinematic representations of history as discourses in the Other is useful because it illustrates some of the ways in which such modes of representation can be problematic. If JFK sets up a hierarchical and uncommunicative relationship between us and the Kennedy assassination itself, then it seems to place too great an emphasis on the past as an independent, inert identity. The historical event itself is fixed in the past, but a web of implication persists from past to present to future. By distancing the present (Us) from the historical referent (Other), is there a danger that the representation is too far removed from reality? This is a question that seems pertinent in light of a film like Errol Morris’ rough cut of Mr. Death /Fred Leuchter in which an expert in capitol punishment technology essentially testifies that Nazis couldn’t have executed prisoners in gas chambers. II. Scale of Mortality - the Holocaust (JPEG - mass mortality) Anne Frank Remembered (1996) Film - especially the Zapruder footage - seems to be a very effective means of documenting or simulating John F. Kennedy’s assassination because the event itself was clearly visible and occurred within a matter of seconds. More importantly, there was a single, identifiable victim of historical significance. The Holocaust presents a challenge to the modes of representation we have seen with the Kennedy assassination because of the immense difference in scale in both the number of victims and the timespan of the historical referent. The arresting mortality of Zapruder’s assassination images are now imbricate webs of unrepresentable violence. Even if film crews had been present inside the walls of concentration camps, is it possible to document the pain and death of over six million people? Anne Frank Remembered and Images of the World and the Inscription of War address this challenge in very different ways. Anne Frank Remembered approaches the subject from firsthand accounts of life before, during, and after the camps centering around the young girl. Anne Frank’s experiences are related by her own diary writings, her family, and her friends who were as involved in the historical event as she was. By reducing the scale of the larger historical currents to the experiences on an individual scale, the film attempts to deconstruct the binarism between the present Self and the historical Other. Historical narratives are related on their own terms to a greater extent than in JFK through the testimony of the eyewitness. The Holocaust is not a history of Anne Frank, however, and in order to begin to represent historical event, the film necessarily entails the experiences of other individuals. Anne Frank at times leaves the exclusive history of one individual in both its narrative content and historical images. There is no way to directly get at the immense scale of mortality except through representation. The representational “character” of Anne Frank becomes a site where the boundary between Self and Other deteriorates: we are allowed to see directly into her life, but thinking about the greater historical significance then distances us from the direct experience of the Holocaust. Consequently, our encounter with the historical Other in Anne Frank comes when we try to make sense of the Holocaust on a larger scale than that of the individual. Is it fair or even safe to assume that the experiences of one are reflective of the experiences of other individuals or of the whole? JFK shifts the clear visual representation of an individual victim into a conspiracy theory involving many victims and culprits - many of whom are never discovered. Anne Frank conversely embodies the history of millions of victims in an identifiable individual. The massive historical significance of the Holocaust is cast in the immediate, subjective, and accessible experience of a few identifiable individuals (Nichols, BB, 16). In this clip, two survivors close to Anne describe what it was like to leave Holland aboard a train, which was eventually headed for Auschwitz. (QT - endless journey) Blair presents us with a narrative construction of different threads of historical representation. He gives us two very different voices and uses the footage of the train and the final chilling point of view shot of the grate serve to place their testimonies in a visual context. The first woman mechanically describes the physical conditions of the passengers, that they didn’t know when the trip would end, and that people could only sit (or sometimes stand). The second woman relates the travel as a charged emotional experience, of people in a powerless trance, of people who tried to sleep while standing up (a much different account than the observation that there was “no possibility to lie”). The forward narrative motion of the train blends these accounts to create a beautiful moment in the film, but it is perhaps more significant to note these differences between their accounts of the same historical event. For the two women in the above clip, the Holocaust has obvious ramifications in each of their present realities. Yet despite the common experience of the historical event, their perceptions of this experience and, indeed, its effects on their lives today differ noticeably. Even they are distanced from the Holocaust to some extent, because the event is fixed in history and the cultural and political contexts of each woman’s life has changed dramatically. We begin to see here that even if a unified historical truth does exist, the truth of the Holocaust in the present can not exist as any all-encompassing narrative reality (Williams 18). The historical reality of the event is fixed, but its realities in the present are both tangible and fragmented. Narrative film’s tendency to initiate a discourse of historical event as the Other risks distancing us not only from the historical event but from its present realities as well. At the end of the film, Blair presents us with the only moving images of Anne Frank in existence. (JPEG / QT clip) This astonishingly powerful footage derives its force from our desire to take visual representations of history and put them into motion, as if we have breathed life back into dead images. The cinematography and editing of this sequence recalls the repeated footage of the Zapruder film in JFK, “Back and to the left…” The images of Anne Frank, however, seem to serve a different end. The filmmaker repeats the images but each time slows down their advance until finally we are again left with a still effigy on the screen. The motivation for repetition in JFK was to extract meaning from the event. Anne Frank Remembered reflects our urge to memorialize the visual icon. Once the Amsterdam street has been set into motion, we desire to freeze and preserve the moment and to fetishize the historical figure under our gaze. The image regains some of its aura that it lost in its reproducibility and is preserved in a timeless, ahistorical setting. The historical reality of death, of the Holocaust, is reconciled with the closed narrative form of the film by extracting the individual figure/image from its irretrievable historical place. Blair illustrates the conflicting desires to both memorialize and explicate the Holocaust. The latter in particular entails our relationship with the Other - a relationship defined by hierarchical difference in representations of the historical event. Anne Frank Remembered in particular tends to memorialize the historical referent. Once an attempt is made to explain it, representation is left as a memorial to the historical event. Similarly, once the narrators have told their stories, the film goes rests on the timeless images and words of Anne Frank. Harun Farocki’s nonlinear, non-narrative Images of the World and the Inscription of War presents us with a very different kind of image of the Holocaust. He is more concerned with modes of representation and correlates depictions of the Holocaust to representational strategies such as architectural elevations, three-dimensional models, and flight simulators. His images of Auschwitz make use of three primary sources: aerial reconnaissance photographs taken by Allied planes (to identify airstrips), drawings from a camp prisoner, and photographs taken of the camp. The many threads of his stories are presented in complicated fragments which require an active viewing on the part of the audience. Images are put before the viewer without any explicit framework in which to place them in context. Historical events - some shown, some implied - do not unfold in a linear or causal form. Images of dead bodies at Auschwitz do not necessarily follow from explanations of how Allied forces ignored the aerial images of concentration camps because they were told to focus on other targets, but Farocki’s editing causes the viewer to make connections such as these. We are forced to reconcile the scales of perception and mortality in the Holocaust. Aerial photographs taken from planes relate the military perspective of removed destruction; Drawings and photographs immediately bring these images down to the scale of immediacy and individuality. Rather than creating an explicit narrative, however, the collage of visual information invites a reconstruction of history on the part of the audience. Farocki’s use of sound works to a similar effect. We hear short, interrupted snippets of classical music (Satie, among others) as if a record is playing but someone is continually fading the volume in and out. When hearing this, we are not sure how to react - the fragments of the composition do not construct any identifiable piece. Farocki encourages a kind of re-composition to take place in our heads. We must fill in the missing information to create a whole, just as we must piece together the broken threads of visual evidence in order to create a reconstruction of historical reality. Farocki thus directly acknowledges his engagement with history as the Other. He presents us with pieces of historical evidence which we must, in a dialogue with his film, recompose into a representation of history. By calling attention to representational strategies and requiring the viewer to participate in the extraction of meanings from these representations, the filmmaker has addressed the problem of representing a historical event in a cultural and political context so different than the one in which the historical event took place. He explicitly acknowledges the role that representation plays in a construction of reality and is careful to draw attention to the film medium as a representational strategy itself. Images of the World is concerned with the representation historical event rather than an explanation of the Holocaust. The film recognizes that the historical event is frozen in the past, but that representational strategies are paramount in constructing our ways of seeing the historical event. Film’s way of framing the event can often determine the realities that the historical event can have in the present. III. Conclusion : Historical reality in the Self/Present - Errol Morris The historical event is fixed in time; any reality of a historical event in the present is necessarily revealed in a fragmentary (rather than a unified, narrative) form. Two of Errol Morris’s films, The Thin Blue Line and Mr. Death / Fred Leuchter seem especially effective at approaching some of the ways in which the truth of a historical Other implicates and infiltrates the Self - the context of our present. In both of these films, Morris is concerned with the relationships between truth and lies and how each functions in the production of a historical reality. In The Thin Blue Line, Randall Adams has been accused of murder and faces the death penalty. One of Morris’ interviewees is David Harris, who in the end provides Morris with a taped confession of his guilt in the murder. As the film progresses, we realize that Harris is also in jail, convicted of a murder and having a past record of violence (Williams). As we begin to put the many claims to truth together, we start to discover what the truth really is. But more importantly than this, Morris gets at this truth not by giving us the one account which seems to most closely reflect it, but by setting the truth against lies. Both figure equally into the construction of a historical truth. The doubly-taped confession at the end of The Thin Blue Line helped to free Randall Adams. Morris’s construction of history in truth, lies, and above all, in visual evidence shifted perceptions of history to the end that the event’s present realities have been changed. In effect, reality not only constructs film but film in return can serve as a construct of reality. The documentary’s claims to truth has expanded this relationship which once seemed so one-sided. The Thin Blue Line makes explicit the ways in which perceiving history inherently effect the reality of the present. In Mr. Death, Fred Leuchter establishes himself as an expert in the electric chair and subsequently other forms of execution such as the gas chamber. The second half of the film traces his dubious research at the sites of concentration camps to see whether or not they did use gas chambers to execute prisoners. We gradually realize that his conclusion is that these sites were more likely bread ovens than gas chambers. (JPEG / Mov) Leuchter’s studies were done in the 1970’s and his findings were picked up by Neo-Nazi groups as unquestionable evidence that the Holocaust did not exist. Morris juxtaposes these claims with other evidence, however. Footage of Leuchter’s tests are interspersed with large amounts of footage of camp records and inventories which call for gas-proof windows and other telling equipment. Morris again represents reality (in this case, the historical Other) by constructing it in terms of the opposition of truth and untruth. (Fiction is not necessarily untruth, either: footage taken from Dead Man Walking serves to reinforce the nonfiction testimony of “Mr. Death.”) Leuchter’s credibility in the first half of the film does not carry into his exploration of the concentration camps. The faction between the two seems to be tied to a mismatch in the scale of mortality. Mr. Death shifts from the individual victim in the electric chair to the mass genocide of the Holocaust, but Fred Leuchter’s expertise does not carry over so easily. Morris exploits this by destroying the credibility of his subject in the second half of the film. But there still remains the danger that Leuchter’s misguided testimony will be given undue credibility. Morris’s dedication of the film to the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust reflects his concern that his representation of history may be misjudged in the realities of the present. In other words, might Neo-Nazis take up this film as a document proclaiming the complete fiction of the Holocaust based on Leuchter’s testimony? Does this film run the danger of changing our historical consciousness to the point that the present is also altered? Such concerns seem to stem from the fact that we rely on representations of history to arrive at an understanding of the reality of a historical event. Filmic representation, as we have seen with JFK and Anne Frank Remembered, tends to distance the present from the past, the audience from the historical event, the Self from the Other. Just as the documentary film is created and not merely recorded, our historical consciousness is a creation of our modes of representation. Representation is the only way to investigate the truth of historical events which are fixed in the past. What is easily overlooked, however, and what Errol Morris’ two films make explicit, is the ways in which modes of representation can determine the realities of our present. Film does not simply take from reality, it presents its recorded simulacra to an audience who uses the images and sounds to reconstruct history and reality in their own minds. Film has traditionally treated its historical subject as the Other. The filmmaker intrudes on the space of the event and seems to create relationships between us and the subject. But the relationships are defined on our own terms; the event is fed to us in a cinematic structure we are comfortable with. The result is that we become distanced from the Other. We may view the Zapruder footage of Kennedy’s assassination several times and begin to relate to the images before us, but that doesn’t bring us any closer to the historical referent itself. The Zapruder footage is one representation of historical reality that is constructed from the visual image and therefore only exists in the audience who sees the film. Although JFK is a much different representation, the same can be said for its reconstruction of history. The distancing of past from present and audience from history poses a threat to our understanding of reality unless we are able to unpack some of these relationships between historical event, filmic representation, perception of this historical reality, and the fragmentary realities that exist in the present as a result of these forces. All historical representations are to some degree constructions, and the way an audience internalizes this reconstructed history begins to reflect something about our own individual and collective realities in the present. Filmography / Bibliography Anne Frank Remembered, John Blair, 1996. Eternal Frame, Ant Farm Collective, 1976. Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Harun Farocki, 1989. JFK, Oliver Stone, 1992. Mr. Death / Fred Leuchter (rough cut), Errol Morris, 1998. Nanook of the North, Robert Flaherty, 1922. The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris, 1988. Barnouw, Erik. Documentary / A History of the Non-fiction Film. New York and Oxford: 1993, p. 39-40. Nichols, Bill. Blurred Boundaries. Indianapolis, 1994, pp. 1-16 and 117-147. Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality. (Especially “Pornography, Ethnography, and the Discourses of Power” by Christian Hansen, Catherine Needham, and Bill Nichols, pp. 201-228.) Indianapolis: 1991. Russell, Catherine. Narrative Mortality / Death, Closure, and New Wave Cinemas. Minneapolis: 1995. esp. pp. 1-30. Williams, Linda. “Mirrors Without Memories,” Film Quarterly vol. 46, no. 3, Spring 1993, pp. 9-20.