Documentary Impulse Research Articles

Killing the Documentarian: Richard Wright and Documentary Modernity

As Bigger Thomas sits wedged uncomfortably between the young, would-be radicals Jan and Mary, Mary touches Bigger's arm and gestures the tall, apartment buildings of Chicago's South Side, telling him, You know, Bigger . . . I've long wanted go into these houses . . . and ]ustsee how your people live.1 To anyone familiar with the history of documentary photography, it's hard not read this scene early in Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) as a pointed satire of the documentary aesthetic. Mary's comment that she wants how your people live carries with it strong connotations of Jacob Riis's seminal How the Other Half Lives (1890), emphasizing the documentary's power of sight interpret, interpellate-and invade-the dark and seemingly unknowable lives of the poor and marginal. Likewise, that her statement is made as Mary imposes an unwanted, or at least highly transgressive, intimacy between she and Bigger further suggests the ways in which the documentary impulse is one of crossing barriers and borders-an impulse that often works reinscribe as much as overcome the privilege on which the borders are founded. As a figure of the documentarian, Mary Dalton fits this role all too tragically: a wealthy progressive who believes that if she is allowed to the conditions in which poor African Americans live, this uniquely visual regime of knowing will transform her and lead her political action. This emphasis on sight, underscored by Wright's italics, as the crucial precursor progressive change is, as critics have argued, the ontology of the political documentary. That Jan and Mary have essentially kidnapped their black subject of knowledge and that their act of vision on the South Side produces race/ism rather than resolves it could easily be taken as Wright's final statement on the 1930s radical documentary.For all of Wright's pointed satire, it's equally important note that less than a year after the publication of Native Son, Wright edits a selection of documentary photographs that do exactly what Mary expresses she wants do: go into tall, apartment buildings and justsee how Wright's people live. As Native Son murders its own white documentarian, then we must ask what the relationship is between Mary's misguided, ultimately desire see and even touch how the Other lives and Wright's own documentary impulse do just that in 12 Million Blac Voices (1941). I would argue that 12 Million Blac Voices-Richard Wright's documentary photo-montage of the Great Migration-is not merely the nonfiction companion Native Son as it was advertised, but rather the culmination of Wright's own contradictory and dialectical concerns with the politics of black representation. In killing the documentarian-the white chronicler of black life-Wright does not abandon the public sphere dominated by a white gaze. As documentary photography has been a significant means by which the West has constructed and codified modern ideas of race, Wright's critique of the mode and his insistence on its constructed nature call into question the very possibility of a visible regime of knowing. Yet, the documentary is also the form perhaps most associated with the political and representational projects of modernity. As Paula Rabinowitz notes, documentary photography is also the medium that can translate the into the future and redeem, in a Benjaminian fashion, the wreckage of history.2 Thus, for Wright, the documentary image stands at just that nexus of historical trauma and liberation that ends 12 Million Blac Voices, the past living in the present and the new procession and new tide of revolutionary progress.3 Like Wright's own contradictory statements on modernity, at once based on the deadly web of slavery and higher human consciousness, photography for Wright becomes an expression of a racial past, as well as a liberatory future.4 For Wright, the documentary image's dialectical mode-containing technologies of both liberation and domination-is thus Wright's precise claim on African American modernity. …

The Tragedy of the Object

The ongoing duel between realist and anti-realist tendencies in film theory usually positions the ideas of André Bazin unambiguously on the realist side. Whatever else we expect to find in his writing – and the current resurgence is finding more and more – we should find this: realism, cinematic realism. But what type of realism? Is it ontological, and, if so, is it based on a claim for the primacy of photography's “analogical” relation to the world, even to the point of a “direct contact” with the physical existence of nature? Is it aesthetic, celebrating depth of field? Unaffected mise-en-scène? The documentary impulse in preference to fantasy or artifice? In this article, however, I want to argue that we must expand the definition of Bazinian realism through its sensitivity to the non-human. The terrain of the cinematic “Real” is inhabited by a singular complex, one that includes physical space, animality, and material objects, as well as persons and events. To shift our attention to these elements and their effects – intimate as well as alienating, familiar as well as jarring and unexpected – offers another way to glimpse the Real. Which is not to say that the socially constituted world drops out. Of course, language, gender and culture are inescapable mediations. Yet they are, in a certain sense, all wrought by a transcendent human hand. Bazin's conception of realism provides access to a space that is less anthropocentric and testifies to an immanence of the Real, such that non-human, objective realism is not about capturing (representing) reality in toto but registering the fact that the human is only a part of (and immanent within) reality. There are realities beyond human subjectivity – in space, in objects, in animality – realities that we are put in contact with by cinema. Ideally, what cinema makes possible is an equality, a democratic freedom, not merely for the human spectator – to view and explore film worlds – but for the viewed “object” too: a democracy of the viewer-viewed that installs intersubjectivity in the Real.

Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (review)

Reviewed by: Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain Jesse Matz Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain. Kristin Bluemel, ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Pp. vii + 254. $95.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper). “Intermodernism” names what has otherwise been called late modernism, “the 1930’s,” post-war literature, and the no man’s land between modernism and postmodernism. Inter in these many ways, “intermodernism” entails a new literary history, one in which these minor designations give way to a major claim to a truly distinctive set of cultural interventions. Intermodernism is far from a lull between storms of creative activity; it intervenes with force enough to make us reconsider what it comes between—not just the modern and the postmodern, but a whole range of opposites it would usefully resolve. Elite and common; social and aesthetic; abstract and realistic; experimental and popular: these are some of the dilemmas undone in intermodernism, which, as Kristin Bluemel defines it, redefines the very bases of twentieth-century literary culture. Modernism has dominated not only our literary histories but our ascriptions of value, our institutional priorities, and our tastes in reading. The effect has been to distort, neglect, and trivialize most of what made twentieth-century literary culture vital and important. “Intermodernism,” conversely, opens up all areas of inquiry and appreciation, naming a dynamic, flexible form of attention to what truly made literature so inventive, so useful, and so perplexing in these years. Bluemel’s powerful, passionate introduction to Intermodernism makes these claims and specifies five features that define this new field. First of all, “intermodernism” designates not just a new historical period but a certain style of engagement, a radical eccentricity similar to that pursued in modernist innovation but centered upon work, community, and other aspects of social commitment. Intermodernism is an ideology. Next, it is functional: just as its writers had practical interests, it serves a practical purpose by transforming our theoretical and institutional practices, opening up new opportunities for the work scholars do. It is a postmodern invention, both because it is seen from our posterior moment and because its theorization accords with postmodern dynamics. It is not just for literary scholars and it is not just a British phenomenon. It may start with scholarly work on neglected mid-century British writers, but it applies to any and all artists who come between the modern and the postmodern, the aesthetic and the social, high and low. These five defining qualities and objectives make the critical project of intermodernism an exciting new recovery effort. Not only does it remedy neglect of a great number of important writers, it recovers “the web of personal and professional relations that sustained Britain during [End Page 665] the dark years of 1930s Depression, 1940s war and 1950s reconstruction” (14); it rediscovers a culture lost between ideological commitments and restores to us the great value, pleasure, and usefulness of work that had been meant to sustain us. Each of this book’s contributors explicitly makes the case for intermodernism while also filling in the detail on writers, relationships, and phenomena that intermodernism enables us now to appreciate. Laura Marcus discusses the documentary movement of the 1930s as it was promoted by John Grierson and Paul Rotha as well as articles published in the largely forgotten journal Cinema Quarterly from 1932 to 1935. Marcus proves that collaborations and conflicts between cinema and literature in these years were crucial to the formation of aesthetic, political, and cultural categories critical to twentieth-century culture. This discovery validates the claim for intermodernism as distinct from either modernism or postmodernism: here, the documentary impulse did not come after modernist aestheticism but instead shaped a modernism that persisted into activities joining aesthetic and realist imperatives. Also effective in arguing for intermodernism is John Fordham’s fine article on region and class in the novels of Harold Heslop. Fordham claims that the industrial novels of the interwar years develop spatial forms that are neither modern nor postmodern but are experimental, nevertheless. These novels are not simply traditional in their return to regional communities. Rather, their innovative designs upon social being make them distinctively forward-looking. Like Marcus, Fordham proves that...

Philip Guston's Return to Figuration and the “1930s Renaissance” of the 1960s

In his paintings from the late 1960s and early 1970s, Philip Guston employed an unconventional model of figuration in which temporal relations forged between two moments produce a meaningful statement about the present. Guston's art partook in a larger “1930s renaissance,” in which artists cited the earlier decade—famous for its documentary impulse—as a means of figuring a present deemed resistant to representation. Guston's use of the past, especially his appropriation of his own earlier motifs, invested his art with the drama of history at a moment when art's capacity to affect history itself appeared increasingly diminished.

Jail Sentences: Representing Prison in Twentieth-Century French Fiction

Andrew Sobanet's Jail Sentences provides a fascinating study of the prison novel in French fiction over the twentieth century. Focusing on selected novels by four authors, all of whom have experienced prison life to varying degrees and in varying roles, Sobanet probes the tensions and ambiguities traversing a body of writing which obliges the reader to speculate on the fraught relationship between referentiality and fictionality. In chapters devoted to the novels of Victor Serge, Jean Genet, Albertine Sarrazin and François Bon, Sobanet demonstrates how each author meshes testimonial and fictional techniques in a bid to heightening the effect of their writings as an ideological and/or critical exposé of incarceration and the French penitentiary system. He begins with Victor Serge's Les Hommes dans la prison (1930), examining the documentary impulse of Serge's narrative and its value as an ‘everyman’ account of incarceration. Yet, as Sobanet demonstrates, such interpretations must be put alongside readings that consider the avowed socio-political purpose of the text and its denunciation of power relations within the French prison system. In Genet's Miracle de la rose (1946), Sobanet analyses the prison novel from a very different narrative perspective, that of Genet's outcast narrator who embraces the role of pariah and flouts the rules of bourgeois society in a work that depicts prison as a site of homoerotic fantasy. In Sarrazin's La Cavale (1965), the uneasy tension between life writing and textual representation is set within the frame of a novel that critiques the debilitating experience of prison on the individual prisoner. As Sobanet emphasizes, for Sarrazin, writing and her textual self-projection represent hope for the future and some respite from the slow degradation of imprisonment. Lastly, in François Bon's Prison (1997), Sobanet explores the multi-faceted and morally charged project of a text which is the product of Bon's own experiences as a director of a prison writing workshop. Weaving fictionalised monologues, material from the prison workshops themselves and the horror of the murder of a former student from the workshop, Bon's hybrid text represents the marginalisation of juvenile prisoners whose life histories offer a searing indictment of the social injustices of contemporary France. Such in-depth textual analysis is, throughout the study, implicated in broader debates on the ways in which we interpret and respond to prison writings. How do authors and readers understand the truth value of such writings? How are fictionalising techniques used to manipulate what we take to be real-life experience? As Sobanet emphasises in his conclusion, ‘reality’ can be rearranged in a myriad of ways in prose fiction. By working to expose the narrative constructions upon which the prison novel is built, Sobanet highlights the often tangled web of truth, fiction and story-telling which is such a prominent feature of contemporary culture's fascination with prison and its effects.

“So This Is Dyoublong”: A Report on the Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 5–11 July 2009

“So This Is Dyoublong”: A Report on the Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 5–11 July 2009 Amanda Sigler Leaning over the area railings in Georgian Dublin and debating whether they should dare to hang over the edges like Bloom but eventually opting to recline against them like Stephen, students at the 2009 Dublin James Joyce Summer School flashed their cameras and smiles, combining literary curiosity with a documentary impulse as they proceeded on the School’s walking tour. The lively tour, led by Keel Geheber of the James Joyce Centre, was the concluding activity in a richly rewarding week of lectures, seminars, workshops, and social events—all organized under the expert academic directorship of Anne Fogarty. When participants gathered at Hourican’s Pub on the opening evening, a convivial spirit of reunion pervaded the atmosphere as longtime friends embraced and joyfully recounted the highlights of past Joycean gatherings. But there were many newcomers as well, and students traveling from places as varied as Asia, Europe, America, and the Middle East were quickly welcomed into the community. This year’s Summer School had a particularly youthful touch on account of the attendance of ten eager teenagers from the Oak Park and River Forest High School in the Chicago suburbs. Their teacher, Brendan Lee, plans to continue the tradition and take a group to Dublin every other year. [End Page 210] On the first day of the School, I sat in on Christine O’Neill’s A Portrait seminar with them and was both impressed by their ability to summarize the morning’s lectures and enlightened by their amateur readings of Joyce’s work. Though “Flaubert” occasionally morphed into “Flow-burt” on their lips (and here “flow” was often pronounced like the abbreviated flower of U 11.861), the students nevertheless extracted the essential points from Scarlett Baron’s characteristically sharp presentation, “‘I will have shown somebody the way’: Flaubert and the Making of James Joyce.” In class, students reported that Stephen Dedalus’s dependence upon literary precedence, as outlined by Scarlett, made him “less of a smarty-pants” and “more accessible.” Responding to Anne Fogarty’s lecture on “Inventing Dublin,” students expressed surprise over how inconsistent Joyce could be in statements about his fictional recasting of Ireland. Flipping through her handout, the class re-examined such famous quotations as “I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis” (LettersII 134). In an earlier comment, Joyce had described “the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city,”1 casting yet further doubt on the precise subject of his project: is it hemiplegia or paralysis? A city or only a place considered to be? The week’s subsequent lectures and seminars were equally thought-provoking. For the remainder of the School, I attended Terence Killeen’s fascinating Finnegans Wake seminar at Boston College, where we sank into overly comfortable chairs and closely studied the henpecked letter of I.5. Other, simultaneous seminars included Peter van de Kamp’s Dubliners, which, I heard, sparked spirited interpretive debates between students and instructor, and two Ulysses classes, led by Fritz Senn and Tom Halpin, which incorporated student-led presentations, included one ambitious high-school participant, and received enthusiastic reviews. In lectures, topics covered a broad spectrum, ranging from the Hungarian and Romanian translations of Ulysses (Erika Mihálycsa) to error (Matthew Creasy), Shakespeare (Laura Pelaschiar), and the textual-genetic origins of Leopold and Molly Bloom (Luca Crispi). Delivered by a combination of seasoned Joyceans and newly-minted doctors of philosophy, the lectures were often enhanced by multimedia presentations or humorous anecdotes. In “A Bloom for No Seasons,” Fritz Senn, Patron of the Dublin James Joyce Summer School, described how Bloom is often defined by what he does not do—in “Cyclops,” for instance, he passes up the drinks and opts instead for a cigar. Here Fritz related a corollary story: an Irishman once asked a Swiss man, “Can I get you a drink?” “No thanks,” the Swiss replied. “I’ve already had one.” Just as the fictional Bloom and his modern-day Swiss counterpart fall short of Irish drinking expectations, so Bloom also refrains from...

Manufacturing truth: the documentary moment in early Soviet culture

This book offers an examination of the relationship between early Soviet documentary and the areas of journalism, politics, and art in early Soviet culture.The Bolshevik Revolution uprooted not only the social and political systems of the Russian Empire but existing artistic institutions and traditions as well. Following the revolution, Soviet artists working in all different media had to respond to the urgent problem of how to make art relevant, even essential to the revolutionary project undertaken by the Bolshevik Party. Focusing on the years 1921-1934, Manufacturing Truth explores the great upsurge in documentary methods and approaches in the arts and reveals how the documentary impulse influenced the development of Stalinist culture. Documentary approaches in literature and film became a central means for redefining the role of the artist, of art itself, and of the institution of art in the new post-revolutionary Soviet society.The documentary impulse offered theorists and practitioners from a wide variety of artistic factions an opportunity for their art to be essential to the revolutionary project. Participation in this trend was supported not only by the avant-garde, which initiated it, but by representatives of artistic movements across the political and stylistic spectrum, in a variety of media. In using documents and documentary methods, writers and filmmakers of the era imparted to their artistic work a kind of authenticity, conveying a sense that they were producing an objective record of a reality that was being rapidly and radically transformed. At the same time, through the act of recording the building of socialism they became participants in the process, thus responding to a perceived historical imperative.As Soviet artists struggled toward the objectivity of historical processes, however, the tension between the two competing aspects of the documentary impulse - its evidentiary quality (fact) and its discursive quality (artifact) - grew into a contradiction. The anxiety of Soviet authors to be relevant and to prove themselves to be relevant to the revolution would lead them to the near effacement of authorship itself. Papazian analyzes the works of Sergei Tretiakov, Dziga Vertov, Maxim Gorky, and Mikhail Zoshchenko to reveal how the documentary impulse defined each author's individual artistic trajectory and led him inexorably to the socialist realist aesthetic. Readers of Russian history, cultural history, literature, and film studies will find much of interest in this engagingly written study.

Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (review)

Reviewed by: Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times Jeffrey Angles Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. By Miriam Silverberg. University of California Press, 2006. 269 pages. Hardcover $49.95. The 1920s and 1930s were a time of massive change in Japan. As the nation recovered from the devastating Kantō earthquake of 1923, the consumer market underwent a period of unprecedented expansion, as did the publishing industry and the related mechanisms of censorship. Meanwhile, the economy swelled and then collapsed, driving the Japanese to increase colonial holdings on the Asian mainland. In conjunction with these developments, there emerged an increasingly complex, cosmopolitan, and hybrid culture of the “modan” that profoundly transformed Japanese life and expression. The last few years have seen a small boom in English monographs documenting various facets of this changing culture, but now, Miriam Silverberg's Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense rises to the top of the list. This well-researched book represents the culmination of over a decade of research conducted before Silverberg's death in 2008. Many chapters may be familiar to readers from articles she wrote in her last years, but there is much that is new, especially in the overarching discussions of popular culture framing specific chapters. Silverberg argues that the culture of the modan era consists of a mélange of different ideas, lifestyles, subcultures, social classes, and ethnicities that coexisted, sometimes forming jarring and seemingly irreconcilable juxtapositions. Rather than presenting a chronological look at modan society as a whole, she makes the wise strategic decision to focus on certain parts of this mix, juxtaposing chapters examining different groups, places, literary forums, and concepts within popular culture. Her look at modan society thereby becomes as much a montage as the society itself. (Silverberg is quick to point out that the montage is a critical expository mode in the art, film, and writing of the era.) In these various chapters, she draws upon an eclectic assortment of materials ranging from contemporaneous commentaries, governmental studies, and fiction to more ephemeral sources, such as magazines and even programs from popular entertainment. The first of the three parts of the book examines the meaning of “modernity,” “modernization,” “modernism,” and “modan” within the context of Japan of the 1920s and 1930s. Silverberg focuses on the ways modernization helped turn people into subjects—both desiring subjects within a culture of rising consumerism and imperial subjects within the Japanese empire. She also provides some overarching discussion of the montage-like culture of the era and its characteristic “documentary impulse,” evident in virtually all aspects of mass media. This documentary impulse, especially as seen in the work of “modernologists” Kon Wajirō, Gonda Yasunosuke, and others, has provided a great wealth of material to Silverberg, and their work features prominently in her account of modan Japan. The second part of the book contains two chapters on two key figures in modan culture: the “modern girl” (moga) and the café waitress. Silverberg argues that these two figures came to occupy a significant position within the cultural imagination, not because of their numbers, but because journalists and authors were obsessed with documenting what they saw as women's changing realities. Silverberg consequently takes [End Page 434] care to distinguish between what we know of the “reality” of these women and the images of them created by the mass media. Also in the second part of the book are two chapters on magazines marketing modan culture to consumers, namely Eiga no tomo (Friends of the Movies) and Shufu no tomo (Friend of the Housewife). In great detail, Silverberg traces the changing contents of these two journals during the interwar period. The chapter on Shufu no tomo, as well as the previous chapters on moga and café waitresses, complement other recent work, such as Barbara Sato's and Sarah Frederick's books on modern women and the media, but what is particularly fresh about Silverberg's analysis is the careful documentation of the ways the domestic and the nation interplayed on the pages of one particular journal as the empire grew and mobilized for war. Part 3 focuses on Asakusa, the busy park in Tokyo where many developments in modern...

The Records of the New York Composers' Forum: The Documentary Motive and Music in the 1930s

The New York City Composers' Forum-Laboratory was created in 1935 as part of the Music Education Division of the Federal Music Project (FMP), under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), funded by Roosevelt's Depression-era New Deal. The Forum was a unique phenomenon in the history of American music. For the first time in American history, the federal government played an active and enthusiastic role in sponsoring and funding the arts. The federally funded Music Project--along with the Federal Writers Project, Federal Theater Project, and Federal Arts Project--was initiated as part of the larger Works Progress Administration (later renamed the Works Projects Administration) in order to get artists and musicians off the streets, out of the breadlines, and into jobs. Yet many people in the musical commu-nitv fervently hoped and believed that it would develop into a permanently funded arts program. A popular venue for the performances of new music, the Composers' Forum thrived from 1935 to 1940. Weekly--and later, biweekly--concerts introduced an exceptional variety of composers to a newly developing audience. Each Forum featured one or two composers, among them Amy Marcy Beach, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford, Roger Sessions, and Elie Siegmeister. Admission was free. Question-and-answer sessions between composers and audience followed the conceits, prompting discussions on a range of topics: modernism, politics, gender, representations of race, Jewish music, American identity, jazz, and other art forms. A stenographer took careful and thorough transcripts of the discussions, and these survive in the National Archives II, in College Park. Maryland. The success of the New York City Composers' Forum prompted cities across the country to institute similar programs. Boston and Philadelphia established flourishing forums that met weekly. Forums in Los Angeles and Chicago were only slightly less active, while cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and San Francisco held forums from time to time. Other activities by the New York branch included a collaboration with Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan to present an evening of All-American ballets--Virgil Thomson's Filling Station, Robert McBride's Showpiece, and Paul Bowles's Yankee Clipper. A special summer season of concerts, produced in conjunction with the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, was broadcast over WNYC, and a series of the regular concerts was broadcast over WQXR. Under the auspices of the Forum, Roy Harris presented a lecture series entitled Let's Make Music over WNYC, which attracted thousands of active listeners. After 1939, federal support for the Forums ceased and various organizations assumed responsibility for maintaining the Forum, which exists to this day (1) THE DOCUMENTARY IMPULSE The careful documenting of Composers' Forum post-concert discussions makes this series particularly valuable for musicological research today. At no other time in American musical history were the reactions and thoughts of the audience documented so extensively and systematically. This emphasis on documentation reflected a wider American phenomenon of the thirties. As William Stott observes, a documentary motive was at work throughout the culture of the time: in the rhetoric of the New Deal and the WPA arts projects; in painting, dance, fiction, and theater; in the new media of radio and picture magazines; in popular thought, education, and advertising. (2) The goal of this documentary work was to record the American experience. The America of the 1930s was engaged in a cultural revolution. Not only did America own a cultural identity, it was a culture that needed to be shared with a broad new public. The documentary motive broughtcomposers and listeners face-to-face for the first time, and recorded the result. Audience reactions, thoughts, and attitudes, usually so elusive, are represented in the Forum documents in abundance, providing a compelling testament to the power of reception and to the dynamic relationship between composer and listener. …

L'art discret du polissage chez Roger Martin du Gard : réécritures romanesques de l'assassinat de Jaurès dans les avant-textes de L'Été 1914

Martin du Gard longed for an "objective" novel, in which he could erase every trace of himself by a patient polishing through a series of rewritings, tending towards an evident narrative, a transparent style, a performance-fiction without the author's discourse. This discipline becomes flawed when the novel is invaded by a historical knowledge threatening its aesthetic and ideological autonomy. The polishing is then used to suture the heterogeneous and to blur politics. The different rewritings of the death of Jaurès in L'Été 1914, show that the initial documentary impulse, gradually contaminated by the temptation of a political discussion, is answered by the aesthetic demand of the "objective" novel. The rewritings work in three main directions : the need to enliven a familiar narrative with the rhythm of a novel, the striving to reach a balance between documented accuracy and the autonomy of fiction, and last, the tension between the ideology of a neutral discourse and the emergence of areas of controversy.

Docufictions: an interview with Martin Scorsese on documentary film

Scorsese discusses the documentary impulse in his own films and the films of others, as well as classic documentaries and his own documentary work. Films dealt with include Paisan, Open City, Elephant Boy, Crisis, Who’s That Knocking on My Door, Two Rode Together, Italianamerican, Casino, Goodfellas, Memphis Belle, Battle of San Pietro, The Battle of Midway, and No Direction Home.

From ‘the horse in motion’ to ‘man in motion’

The series of pictures suffer almost as much in separation as do those distressing glimpses of the horse in motion, which are true to the instant, but false to the larger fact. (Black 1896, p. 60...

Sound Memory: Paris Street Cries in Balzac's Pere Goriot

At the heart of Le Père Goriot, on the eve of one of "les jours les plus extraordinaires de l'histoire de la maison" (3:91),1 is an episode in which Madame Vauquer's boarders, flush with Bordeaux wine, recite and bellow the cries of Parisian street peddlers at dinner. Rastignac has apparently committed himself to two mutually exclusive romantic plots, either of which would secure his fortune, by both courting Victorine Taillefer and accepting Goriot's offer of a garçonnière. That night, Taillefer fils will be murdered, enabling Rastignac to obtain Victorine's dowry and share the profits with Vautrin, the mastermind behind the deal. This will be Vautrin's last meal at the Pension Vauquer before he is unmasked and arrested as Trompe-la-Mort. At this moment, as each intrigue is wound tighter, it may seem odd that the lodgers are imitating street peddlers, those itinerant merchants who circulated among the faubourgs crying out their wares. Yet this short scene, which stages Vautrin's relationship to the other main characters, relates to a long tradition of discourse on street cries dating back to the Middle Ages. Representations of street cries had renewed appeal in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century writings of, among others, Jo–seph Mainzer and Victor Fournel. Seen in this broader context and in the context of Balzac's other references to modern Paris, the street cries in Le Père Goriot draw out the novel's ethnographic discussion of the sounds and class dynamics characteristic of early-nineteenth-century Paris. Like the ethnographic literature with which it shares a common interest in the crieurs de Paris as expressions of Parisian identity, Honoré de Balzac's novel reconstructs a folkloric aural past and shows the extent to which sound defines identity. From the Middle Ages onward, chapmen or colporteurs traveled from village to village advertising their wares in the streets. Each trade [End Page 67] had a distinctive cry, a combination of words and characteristic tune, such that buyers could identify the itinerant merchant by a sound marker; however, street criers are frequently conflated into a broad category of peddlers. Although originally colporteur signified the official profession of the itinerant vendor of broadsheets (papiers volants) and images, the word came to designate all hawkers.2 By the eighteenth century, colporteurs were viewed with increased suspicion, because they sold goods illegally, sold defective merchandise, or spread malicious and subversive information, and laws were created to regulate hawking.3 The evolution of street criers' representation parallels the sedentary bourgeois' increased suspicion toward lower-class transience, marginality and criminality. Street cries eventually become a metonym for the working class as a whole, now defined by raucousness and criminality as opposed to bourgeois silence and respectability. The Cris de Paris refer both to the historical practice of peddling and to an art (either written, visual or aural) form that dates back to Guillaume de la Villeneuve's thirteenth-century poem "Les Crieries de Paris," and to sixteenth-century woodcuts.4 A modern revival of interest in the Cris de Paris from as early as the 1820s coincided with a gradual decline in the practice. As Balzac and Fournel were keenly aware, the reorganization of space following the urban renewal begun under Napoleon I and spearheaded by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s was changing sound culture, and street criers were increasingly confined to the older neighborhoods of Paris. Their perceived disappearance, and their concomitant association with Vieux Paris, was likely what motivated nineteenth-century writers engaged in Parisian ethnography. These ethnographers drew on the genre set out in Louis-Sébastien Mercier's Tableau de Paris to document their societies and capture what was new and changing. Balzac heeded this documentary impulse by contributing to an evolving body of littérature pano–ramique5; moreover, his novels, especially Le Père Goriot, can be productively read as a folkloric record or a literary ethnography...

The Documentary Impulse: Archives in the Bush

A wide variety of documents exist in Cameroonian rural villages, few of which are likely to be preserved since many are not perceived as being worthy of long-term conservation as well as being vulnerable to damp, termites, and to recycling in the form of cigarette or wrapping paper. In this paper I consider the information contained in the different types of written record and how they interrelate. In a companion piece (Zeitlyn mss) I continue to discuss a diary written at my instigation over an eighteen-month period.Anthropologists and historians alike are prone to a writing disease: “If in doubt write it down.” We record things often for the sake of recording (sometimes without having a specific end in mind for any particular record). Valuable serendipity often results, and our colleagues and successors, as well as the descendants of those we have worked with are sometimes the beneficiaries. Academics, and anthropologists among them, often seek out like-minded people to spend time with. This in itself raises some questions about the generalizability of information so received. But leaving that aside, the accounts of anthropologists and their key informants (for example Muchona [Turner 1967], Ogotommêli [Griaule 1965]) are striking, as much for the resemblances between academic and informant as for their putative differences.

An Aesthetic Appropriate to Conditions: Killer of Sheep, (Neo)Realism, and the Documentary Impulse

An Aesthetic Appropriate to Conditions: Killer of Sheep, (Neo)Realism, and the Documentary Impulse

Cinema and Social Change in Latin America: Conversations with Filmmakers

Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. The Documentary Impulse: The Drama of Reality 1. Fernando Birri (Argentina), The Roots of Documentary Realism 2. Mario Handler (Uruguay), Starting from Scratch: Artisanship and Agitprop 3. Jorge Silva and Marta Rodriguez (Colombia), Cine-Sociology and Social Change 4. Jorge Sanjines (Bolivia), Revolutionary Cinema: The Bolivian Experience 5. Patricio Guzman (Chile), Politics and the Documentary in People's Chile 6. Emilio Rodriguez Vazquez and Carlos Vicente Ibarra (Puerto Rico and Nicaragua), Filmmaking in Nicaragua: From Insurrection to INCINE 7. Helena Solberg-Ladd (Brazil and United States), The View from the United States Part II. Fictional Filmmaking: The Reality of Drama 8. Glauber Rocha (Brazil), Cinema Novo and the Dialectics of Popular Culture 9. Tomas Gutierrez Alea (Cuba), Beyond the Reflection of Reality 10. Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil), Toward a Popular Cinema 11. Humberto Solas (Cuba), Every Point of Arrival Is a Point of Departure 12. Antonio Eguino (Bolivia), Neorealism in Bolivia 13. Carlos Diegues (Brazil), The Mind of Cinema Novo 14. Raul Ruiz (Chile and France), Between Institutions 15. Marcela Fernandez Violante (Mexico), Inside the Mexican Film Industry: A Woman's Perspective Part III. Behind the Scenes 16. Nelson Villagra (Chile), The Actor at Home and in Exile 17. Walter Achugar (Uruguay and Latin America at Large), Using Movies to Make Movies 18. Enrique Colina (Cuba), The Film Critic on Prime Time 19. Julio Garcia Espinosa (Cuba), Theory and Practice of Film and Popular Culture in Cuba 20. Alfonso Gumucio Dagron (Bolivia and Latin America at Large), A Product of Circumstances: Reflections of a Media Activist For Further Reading Appendix: Films and Writings by Latin American Directors Index of Films General Index

Sexy Rice. Plant Gender, Farm Manuals, and Grass-Roots Nativism

T | HE title 'Sexy Rice' is a playful reference to the popular practice among farmers in the Edo period of categorizing rice and other flora by gender. Any given plant was identified as either female or male.' Moreover, the 'female' of a species was deemed superior in every respect to the 'male'. The cultivation of either 'female' seeds or seeds from 'female' plants allegedly insured high-quality crops and yielded bumper harvests. The inclusion of plant-gender discourses in many of the leading nisho by (farm manuals) of the time bespeaks the considerable attention given to the practice of gender-based crop categorization. Nisho is the generic term for books, tracts, diaries, prose-poems, chronicles, memoranda, and catalogues dealing with agricultural and rural affairs. There was a great deal of variation in the actual prose style and format of farm manuals. Nisho aimed at the ordinary farmer were usually written, often by educated farmers, utilizing a simple vocabulary. Some were little more than illustrated leaflets. Those intended for administrators and local officials tended to abound in Chinese-character compounds. Farm manuals emerged as a genre in the Edo period and derive in common from a documentary impulse: a concern to record for posterity, in an ethnographic mode, the performance of farming and husbandry. The nisho genre reflects the bakufu's insistence on the primacy of agriculture, and its emergence parallels the increasing cogency offitsugaku At (practical or useful learning) as a mode of inquiry predicated on a conception of reality as verifiable by tangible forms and judgeable by actual things. As instructional

Documentary Expression and Thirties America.

A comprehensive inquiry into the attitudes and ambitions that characterized the documentary impulse of the thirties. The subject is a large one, for it embraces (among much else) radical journalism, academic sociology, the esthetics of photography, Government relief programs, radio broadcasting, the literature of social work, the rhetoric of political persuasion, and the effect of all these on the traditional arts of literature, painting, theater and dance. The great merit of Mr. Stott's study lies precisely in its wide-ranging view of this complex terrain.-Hilton Kramer, New York Times Book Review [Scott] might be called the Aristotle of documentary. No one before him has so comprehensively surveyed the achievement of the 1930s, suggesting what should be admired, what condemned, and why; no one else has so persuasively furnished an aesthetic for judging the form.-Times Literary Supplement