Liberators: Documentary and the Construction of Public History

Abstract

Calvert | Liberators: Documentary and the Construction of Public History Pamela Calvert Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers/ Foundation for Independent Video and Film Liberators: Documentary and the Construction of Public History ou seem to suggest that this journalistic effort was required to have been resear ed and documented in the same way as an academic thesis. We disagree. We believe that we have told a story that needed to be told.William Miles and Nina Rosenblum The modern historical documentary stands uneasily at the crossroads of chronicle and narrative, history and story. Differing agendas, expectations, practices, and protocols may interact so as to make head-on collision inevitable, with the film caught in the middle. Such a calamity was the case of Liberators: Fighting On Two Fronts In World WarII, an acclaimed documentary on black combat units by William Miles and Nina Rosenblum completed in 1992. Only months later, during the same week the film was nominated for an AcademyAward, WNET withdrew it from circulation in response to allegations that much of its material ranged from wishful thinking to outright fraud. It is not my intention to determine whether or to what degree Liberators'^ "factual." Rather, an examination of the creation and reception of the film offers the opportunity to indicate how the practices and expectations of historical documentary filmmaking interact with those of other forms of historicizing. The Creation of Liberators Narrated by Denzel Washington and Lou Gossett, Liberators relates the experiences of African-American soldiers in WWII, focusing on the 761st Tank Battalion and, to a lesser extent, the 183rd Battalion of Engineers. The film title's reference to "two fronts" refers to the irony of the men's struggle to achieve equality in the segregated armed forces while the entire nation was mobilized against, in the film's words, "the most violently racist empire the world has ever known." Simultaneously placing the soldiers in the nascent 24 I Film & History civil rights movement at home and in the war to end Nazi terror in Europe, the film draws intentional and repeated parallels between the positions of the African Americans and the European Jews; their experiences, histories and battles against racism are presented as equivalent and conterminous . Going beyond the theoretical and illustrating its point with the literal, the film foregrounds the testimonies of several of the soldiers of the 761st and 183rd relating their experiences of"liberating" the Nazi death camps of Dachau The Black Image in Film | Special In-Depth Section and Buchenwald, as well as the recollections by survivors of those camps ofwitnessing black soldiers during the days and weeks following liberation. Balancing the well-known record ofJewish participation in the civil rights struggles in the South, the film places the African American in an analogous focal moment ofJewish history. A journalist describes the film's intended effect as follows: By binding the tragedies of racism and anti-Semitism in one historic moment, Rosenblum and Miles tempered, at least for one shining moment, a rage born of economic and social inequality, and freed African-Americans to be privileged witnesses to Jewish pain. (Hooper 69) African-American soldiers did face clear and indefensible discrimination by the armed forces, and the 761st did have a heroic wartime record which was insufficiently recognized and rewarded until President Carter gave the unit the Presidential Citation in 1978; these points are unquestioned. It was rather the film's crediting the unit with the status ofconcentration camp Liberators which occasioned the close scrutiny and, when the claims could not be documented, brought down a firestorm of protest. How Liberators was made, and how its focus came to be placed on the relationship of the troops to the Jews of Europe—rather than on their combat record—may be seen to contain the seeds of the eventual disaster. Since the war, the men of the 761st Tank Battalion showed several distinctive characteristics: grievance with the armed forces and the press; the need to present their history to themselves and to the world; and a strong sense of cohesiveness which manifested itself in exceptionally well-attended reunions. This kind of community has been described by Barbara Myerhoffin these words: Sometimes conditions conspire to...