Newsreel Footage Research Articles

Hyperlinking History and Illegitimate Imagination: The Historiographic Metafictional E-novel

‘Historiographic Metafiction’ (HM) is a literary term first coined by creative writing academic Linda Hutcheon in 1988, and which refers to the postmodern practice of a fiction author inserting imagined--or illegitimate--characters into narratives that are intended to be received as authentic and historically accurate, that is, ostensibly legitimate. Such adventurous and bold authorial strategies frequently result in “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon, A Poetics 5). They can be so entertaining and engaging that the overtly intertextual, explicitly inventive work of biographical HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (Nunning 353) for, as Philippa Gregory, the author of HM novel The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), has said regarding this genre of creative writing: “Fiction is about imagined feelings and thoughts. History depends on the outer life. The novel is always about the inner life. Fiction can sometimes do more than history. It can fill the gaps” (University of Sussex). In a way, this article will be filling one of the gaps regarding HM...

Michael Dennis. The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial Democracy.

On May 30, 1937, Chicago police shot into a crowd of strikers at “Little Steel” companies such as Republic and Inland. Ten people died. As newsreel footage revealed, most were shot in the back. American citizens had been killed exercising their rights to assembly and speech. It should have galvanized public opinion in favor of workers; it did not. Instead, the Chicago press labeled strikers a wild mob of dangerous reds; the newsreel footage that showed a police riot counted for little. The police, mayor, and governor continued to harass and repress unionists who tried to take to the streets to protest companies. Steel firms relied on their spies to tell managers who to blacklist; company police remained armed with machine guns. The federal government did little or nothing to counter what could legitimately be termed a reign of terror. A month later, the strike collapsed. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's indifference to the fate of the union was clear long before he called for a “plague on both … houses” of labor and business.

Rienzi (review)

Reviewed by: Rienzi Micaela Baranello Richard Wagner . Rienzi. DVD. Sebastian Lang-Lessing / Deutsche Oper Berlin. With Torsten Kerl, Camilla Nylund, Ante Jerkunica, Kate Aldrich, Krzysztof Szumánski. [Halle an der Saale, Germany]: Arthaus Musik, 2010. 101521. $39.99. This first video of the early Wagner opera Rienziis a welcome contribution to the DVD catalogue. The grand opera dating from 1842 is a surprisingly engrossing political drama set in late medieval Rome, contrasting large public scenes with private double-dealing. With some conventional numbers and some larger, more dramatic sections in the later acts, its score at times echoes Meyerbeer and at others, bel canto. The work bears scant resemblance to mature Wagner, and the score contains both inspired and banal music. Today the opera is best known for its reception by one individual: Adolf Hitler was obsessed with it. The parallels with its demagogic, messianic title character are only too obvious, and serve as the hook for this 2009 Deutsche Oper Berlin production. Rienziis a forbiddingly long work, and most recordings and performances are cut. The premiere reputedly ran over six hours, and it is believed the lost manuscript score of this edition burned in Hitler's bunker. Later editions are nearly as long. This production, however, takes cutting to a new extreme presenting only around half the score. Excisions are both large, such as the entire No. 7 (the opening scene of Act 2) and small (seemingly no aria or recit is left intact without internal cuts). Only the well-known overture is performed in its entirety. Some of the strongest music remains, such as Rienzi and Adriano's major arias, but some cuts seem to have been made for reasons of expediency rather than artistic merit. (The loss of the concertantewith children's chorus in Act 2 is unfortunate.) This approach drastically alters the mood of the opera, which goes from a stately and complex political tragedy to a fragmentary series of tableaus painted in broad dramatic strokes, the supporting characters rendered inconsequential or eliminated completely. Scholars will find it lacking as a performance of Rienzi, serving as little more than a preview. The producers are honest about the edition, describing it as a "version in two parts by Philipp Stölzl and Christian Maier." But on its own terms, the edition has significant merit. Director Stölzl's production explicitly evokes the Expressionism of the Weimar era and the Nazis, with a flat cartoonish cityscape and a large R and pictures of Rome replacing the swastika and Berlin. He essentially trusts that the mythology of the Third Reich will fill in the blanks of the drama, with the help of a few minor text edits (the "free Romans" in Act 1 become "proud Romans"). Genocide remains discreetly offstage, though war intrudes towards the end, and we are trusted to interpose our own conventional wisdom of Nazis as the evilest of evil to make sense of the story. Stölzl cuts most of the episodes involving [End Page 141]the Church, and what remains is confusing and an insufficient counterweight to the title character. Yet on the whole the production works well and produces a number of memorable images. In Act 1, a flat cityscape recalls Metropolis, when Rienzi takes over a gallery of Weimar freaks (contrasted with Irene, a blond Mädchen in a Drindl) and transforms into a uniformed, ordered army. In the second half, a stunning double-level set portrays the street above and Rienzi's bunker-like headquarters below. The production effectively uses video, imitating grainy newsreel footage, in Rienzi's proclamations. Musically the performance is solid, with particularly good contributions by the well-drilled chorus and excellent orchestra. Torsten Kerl sings Rienzi with sweet yet forceful tone, though struggling with the fiorature. While he sincerely tries to act, he is not the most charismatic of singers. The strongest portrayal is Kate Aldrich's impassioned Adriano Colonna, sung with a creamy mezzo and acted with conviction. Camilla Nylund is silvery but often sharp as Irene. None of the other singers really register, their roles having been far reduced, another unfortunate side effect of the large-scale cuts. Sebastian Lang-Lessings' conducting...

Filmer pour la Nation : le cinéma d’actualité et la constitution d’une mémoire visuelle en Chine, 1911-1941

Anne Kerlan, Filming for the Nation : The Newsreel and the Construction of Visual Memory in China, 1911-1941 This article re-examines the first developments of newsreel footage up until 1937 through the work of Li Minwei, a director originally from Hong Kong. Li filmed at various times the political events around Sun Yat-sen and then Chiang Kai-shek. He took part in 1930 in the founding of a film company, Lianhua, which placed a very special emphasis on the production of newsreel films. The article examines the goals of the producers, whether they worked in conjunction with the Guomindang or on other types of projects. These newsreel films, in the diversity of their contents, undoubtedly constitute an archive of the history of China, but they also reveal differing conceptions of the national memory then in the process of construction.

Film Forays of the South Manchuria Railway Company

Beginning in the 1920s, and continuing for nearly a quarter century, the South Manchuria Railway Company (SMR) was involved in the financing and production of films. Its motion picture division released more than two hundred unique titles, some of which garnered international praise, before the Second World War forced its doors shut. SMR filmmakers produced travelogues, documentaries, proto-ethnographic films, educational shorts, industrials, reportage, advertisements, and political propaganda. They also recorded newsreel footage and occasionally worked on theatrical movies. SMR filmmakers borrowed techniques and artistic forms from around the globe, integrating them with their own aesthetic sensibilities to create a signature style. Despite its numerous achievements, the company's legacy remains unappreciated and its place in East Asian cinema misunderstood.

Rohmer's Triple Agent : Theatricality, Archive and the 1930s

Rohmer's Triple Agent: Theatricality, Archive and the 1930s Ivone Margulies Art is a reflection of our time: isn't it also the antidote? —Eric Rohmer "After a certain moment," states Serge Daney in "Actualité de Rohmer," "the filmmaker was recognized as one of the rare witnesses of his times. Even his critics who could not see themselves in his conservative ideology and antiquated thematic felt that ten years later films signed by Rohmer would become sociological 'documents' of a certain atmosphere of the times which would not always remain the same." 1 For Daney, the films' accurate representation of his characters' social idiolect explains Rohmer's success in finding his public once a year. His characters, a wave of ever-young individuals, constitute an archive of types from one particular social stratum: bourgeois, liberal professionals, artists and intellectuals who are united in being talkative. As they conjecture they reveal a set of values and ideas. A minor but curious absence, that of a filmmaker, in Rohmer's extensive roster of professionals suggests there may be something to my inquiry on the role of cinema, or more precisely of documentary images in Rohmer's work. The unprecedented use of newsreel footage in Rohmer's Triple Agent (2004) leads us to ask whether the inclusion of archival documents of the politically charged 1930s signals a departure for a director who markedly shuns self-reflexivity and who is thought to keep politics at bay. Although Rohmer's adaptations have incorporated a wide range of artificial materials, including visual and audio references ranging from paintings and plays to cardboard trees, film footage has been conspicuously absent. In Triple Agent, momentous political news and change blast intermittently throughout in stark contrast to this chamber-like espionage drama, the interplay between the archive and theater bringing to the fore ontological issues that have always preoccupied Rohmer, namely, the status of the real and of documentary in cinema. Documents and artifacts have a time-capsule role in Rohmer's second-degree realism. Cinema, as an instrument of witnessing, preservation, and archiving is inseparable from Rohmer's attraction to history. He reconstitutes "what would have been produced if cinema existed," 2 ostensibly compensating for the lack of photographic record of a given time as he does, for instance, when he filters the Paris of the French Revolution through eighteenth-century landscape painting in The Lady and the Duke. [End Page 88] What happens once Rohmer recreates a time when cinema exists and he can thereby include, within his fictional thirties, a perspective other than his own, a broader witnessing viewpoint? What is the nature and effect of the newsreels' mediation, and does the actualities' irrevocable contingency, barely keeping up with the incredible popular energies sparked by the Popular Front, give a new slant to Rohmer's typically oblique approach to politics? 3 The Agent's audience Triple Agent's newsreel track starts with the news of Léon Blum's victory, and it covers events up to 1938; it ends with an abridged newsreel montage of events from the 1939 Munich Pact to 1943. The film is based on the actual story of a white Russian agent, General Nikolai Skoblin, named Fiodor Voronin in the film. It consists of a series of lengthy conversations between the protagonist, his communist neighbors, and members of the Association of White Russian army émigrés. Fiodor's fantastic political scenarios regarding his activities, his comings and goings, and the power maneuvers involving the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the White Russian community are addressed mainly to Arsinoé, his wife and main interlocutor. Originally a famous Russian singer, here she is Greek, and a middling painter. Rohmer was interested in Skoblin's story for its potential to revolve entirely around the on dit (rumor). In Shanghai on the Metro, Michael Miller relays that none of the secret groups operating in Europe after the First World War were comparable to the White Russians in levels of conspiracy and extravagant allegation. 4 It is this conspiratorial aspect of interwar international espionage, with its obfuscation of political consequence, that appeals to Rohmer's experiments with a closed-off storytelling style. This convoluted intrigue—we later...

The Great Migration: Journey to the North (review)

Reviewed by: The Great Migration: Journey to the North Deborah Stevenson, Editor Eloise Greenfield ; The Great Migration: Journey to the North illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist . Amistad/HarperCollins, 2011. [32p]. ISBN 978-0-06-125921-0 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 2-4. “Between 1915 and 1930, more than a million African Americans left their homes in the South, the southern part of the United States, and moved to the North. This movement was named ‘The Great Migration.’” That’s Eloise Greenfield’s factual description of this famous historical transition; she then moves quickly from the impersonal to the personal in a sequence of free-verse poems, and in the process she turns a huge demographic event into a keenly evoked, deeply individual experience for all those who underwent it. Greenfield’s in a particularly good position to achieve this feat: not only is she an esteemed poet, but she herself was, at the ripe age of three months, one of the migrants, a piece of personalizing information that’s a quietly effective bridge to the voices in the poetry. In the poetic main text, conversational verse paragraphs follow a numbered sequence, beginning with the decision to leave (“The News”) and the farewells from many different perspectives (“Goodbyes”), moving on to the journey itself (“The Trip”), the uncertainty about the new life (“Question”), and the arrivals in the North (“Up North”), and concluding with a poem about Greenfield’s family experience (“My Family”). The voices of participants, identified only by general terms such as “Young Woman,” display an acrobatic balance between the individual view and the experience of the many. “I never want to see this town/ again,” says a woman who can’t wait to leave her bitter existence behind; “I’m a little scared./ I’m a lot scared,” says a young woman being sent North on her own by her loving mother. Other poems provide third-person views that sound like the observations of invisible spectators, who note “crowds of people, waiting,/ resting their old suitcases,/ cuddling their babies” and “carrying,/ in bags and shoe boxes,/ food they’ve packed for the trip”; Greenfield’s own journey is just that of “one family/ among the many thousands.” The style is plainspoken and accessible, with definite echoes of oral narrative, yet there are also touches of inventively phrased observation (“A baby tries/ to cry, but sleep catches him/ in the middle of his complaint”). The result is a thoughtful portrait of an experience both collective and personal, a historic event made human, accessible, and poetic. It’s Gilchrist’s masterful and evocative mixed-media illustrations, however, that really lift this petite poetic tale into the monumental. Images deftly combine collage, mostly elements of historical photographs enhanced and adapted, with colorful painterly brushstrokes that wash the monochromatic figures with varying hues. The group shots in particular have a mute documentary feel that suggests newsreel footage paused at an indelibly memorable frame, as rows of travelers in the train car lead the eye back to a perspective point that’s merely a door to another car, or baggage-toting passengers waiting to board look out at the viewer with expressions [End Page 267] of cautious optimism. Aside from the people themselves, locomotives, tracks, and stations are the predominant element, casting their literal imprint over the experience (one spread expands on the old cinematic device of using the map as symbolic train background by making it into the space between the rails) and providing the stage for the human drama. The result is haunting personalized portraiture that adds both emotional immediacy and the stature of historical significance. A brief bibliography of adult materials is appended, but there are also plenty of materials for young people that could make eloquent counterparts to this account: Harrington’s autobiographical picture book Going North (BCCB 11/04), for instance, or Myers’ poetic accompaniment to Jacob Lawrence’s paintings in The Great Migration (BCCB 11/93). Its accessibility allows young people to read it on their own, yet it would also make for a compelling readaloud to kids old enough to have some historical context. However you use the work, it offers a vivid...

64. Mittelbau-Dora. American and German representations of a Nazi concentration camp. Literature, visual media and the culture of memory from 1945 to the present.

In 1945, U.S. Americans liberated the Nazi concentration camp complex of Mittelbau-Dora, and retrieved tons of intact rocket technology from the nearby Mittelwerke factory. Today, an astounding mix of first-hand memoirs, biographies and false survivor tales, novels and theater plays, Hollywood movies and newsreel footage testify to the role the U.S.A. have played with regard to Mittelbau-Dora, and vice versa. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of these textual and visual representations, and juxtaposes them to publications by German eyewitnesses, local researchers and academic historians, and experts in cultural memory.

Conference Report: Orphans Take Manhattan: The 6th Biannual Orphan Film Symposium, March 26–29, 2008, New York City

Conference Report: Orphans Take Manhattan:The 6th Biannual Orphan Film Symposium, March 26–29, 2008, New York City Devin Orgeron (bio) The Orphan Film Symposium biannually reminds attendees of the vast, unexplored range of moving images that transcend the commercial, aesthetic, or philosophical categories that have defined film studies for several decades. The meticulous Orphans Web site (http://www.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/) defines an "orphan film" as a motion picture abandoned by its owner or caretaker. More generally, the term refers to all manner of films outside of the commercial mainstream: public domain materials, home movies, outtakes, unreleased films, industrial and educational movies, independent documentaries, ethnographic films, newsreels, censored material, underground works, experimental pieces, silent-era productions, stock footage, found footage, medical films, kinescopes, small- and unusual-gauge films, amateur productions, surveillance footage, test reels, government films, advertisements, sponsored films, student works, and sundry other ephemeral pieces of celluloid (or paper or glass or tape or . . .). This list, which itself is only partial, begins to illustrate the immensity of this emerging and important subfield in moving image studies, and each Orphan Film Symposium has effectively served to expand the boundaries further still. In any given year, one might expect to hear a paper on a collection of home movies; view and participate in a discussion of recently unearthed Hollywood screen-tests; listen to experts describe the restoration of a particularly rich bit of newsreel footage, and then view that footage; puzzle over the rhetoric of mid-century classroom films; view a contemporary film made from damaged archival films; or discuss the means by which banned film and video materials might reach viewers via the Internet. Part academic conference, part professional trade meeting, part lesson in archiving and preservation, part festival, the event coalesces around a now-traditional and largely informal last-night finale screening where a friendly and amusing element of one-upmanship and surprise prevails. Veterans of the Orphan Film Symposium approached the 2008 meeting in New York City with mixed emotions. Since 1999, these gatherings have established [End Page 114] a reputation for being the conference where theorists, historians, artists, archivists, activists, preservationists, lab experts, projectionists, collectors, and enthusiasts can spend a long weekend together, from dawn 'til well after dusk, and come out smiling, edified, and energized by the experience. The University of South Carolina was the symposium's previous and original home, and some of us wondered, half-jokingly, if there was something about Columbia, South Carolina, that held this delicate blend of ingredients in suspension. Was it the ineffable magic of Southern hospitality? Were conference organizers slipping something into the traditional sweet tea that graced our tables at lunch? What, we asked, would Manhattan do to Orphans VI? South Carolina's curious charms and intimacy were missed this year, but the elements that make this symposium unique and vital to our field remained. One of these is a longstanding commitment to broadening the "film studies" conversation to include the litany of participants listed above. Since the symposium's inception, Dan Streible, chief organizer and spokesperson, has sought to assemble a staggeringly varied lineup of speakers, screenings, and discussions. Far from being a preservationist's soapbox, the symposium's intention from the start has been to provide a forum for the consideration of film from a number of perspectives within the film community at large, with an eye toward understanding and negotiating the quite real physical legacy cinemania leaves in its wake. Community is the operative word here, and few conferences strive for (much less achieve) anything even approaching the communal spirit of this biannual meeting. Since 1999 there have been no simultaneous panels, and participants spend most of their days and most of their meals (which come with the registration) together. This results in something like a festival atmosphere, minus the schmoozing and deal making, and the mood catches quickly. New York, it seems, is an ideal home for the meeting. The city's energy echoes the energy the symposium generates on its own. Hosted by New York University's Cinema Studies department and its Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program, the event took place at the Cantor Film Center and other buildings scattered around...

Nation, Identity and Loss of Footing: Mia Couto’s O Outro Pé da Sereia and the Question of Lusophone Postcolonialism

In 1974, in the turbulent and heady months that followed April, I watched with growing adolescent rage as the conceptual framework of my colonial life-world crumbled abruptly around me. For the first time in my life, I heard the words colony and colonialism refer to a birthplace I had been educated to imagine as an integral and indissoluble part of the European fatherland. Admittedly, my experience of the metropolis amounted to little more than an amalgam of exotic toponyms that I had to commit to memory in order to pass my geography exams. My idea of Portugal was, in fact, ultimately reducible to the grainy newsreel footage of jolly, well-fed dignitaries, and on a single and memorable occasion the gleam of an unelected head of state's bald pate rushing past me in the backseat of an American limousine . . . after I had stood at attention for hours, at the age of eight or nine, clad in a borrowed Mocidade Portuguese uniform, with the infinite weight of the imperial standard resting unsteadily on my belt buckle. Nevertheless, I believed, probably with most of my classmates, that the Portuguese mode of being in Africa was, as the dictator Salazar defined it in the pages of Life magazine in the early sixties, buttressed by a natural [national] penchant [um pendor natural] toward multiracialism, a vocation to establish contacts with other

Reframing Chicago's Memorial Day Massacre, May 30, 1937

This essay re-examines one of the twentieth century's most well-known instances of violence against labor. It focuses on the incident's iconic imagery, which showed Chicago police beating and shooting at protesters in the midst of the 1937 "Little Steel" strike. As this essay reveals, newsreel footage and news photographs long held to demonstrate police responsibility for the violence first appeared in metropolitan dailies and nationally circulating magazines in stories representing strikers as a mob that sought to storm the Republic Steel plant, leaving police no option but to shoot. This essay emphasizes the political influence of an increasingly national and photographic mass media. Sustaining earlier scholarship, this study identifies the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, Paul Anderson, and the La Follette committee as central players in a campaign to reverse public understanding of events in Chicago. In its attention to the conflict over the use and meaning of newsreel footage and photographs, the essay documents how labor and its allies engineered a re-reading of news imagery first employed by Chicago officials and Republic Steel executives to condemn workers' activism. This re-reading took place at Chicago rallies, in Washington congressional rooms, and ultimately, within the newly nationalized, photographic media itself. Understanding how labor reversed the interpretation of these images before the American public suggests that labor's newfound political might included a sophisticated ability to renegotiate its visual representation, and to capitalize on the growing salience of news photography to restrict corporate and state violence against unions. The essay's experimental form stresses cultural history's power to re-animate the past, specifically in its meditation on the nature and limits of photographic evidence. Archival evidence for this essay comes from the Grinberg Film Libraries, the Congressional records at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the United Steel Workers of America Papers, the George Patterson Papers, and the Lawrence Jacques Papers at the Chicago Historical Society.

Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton (review)

Reviewed by: Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton Christopher Pramuk (bio) Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton. Written and directed by Morgan Atkinson. 67 minutes. Duckworks, Inc. DVD. $30.00 Independent filmmaker Morgan Atkinson has given us a moving and sometimes provocative new meditation on the life of Thomas Merton. Much like Paul Wilkes' [End Page 99] 1986 "Film Biography" of Merton, Soul Searching is more "meditation" than documentary, evoking the elusive shades of Merton's life through a rich mosaic of images, words, music, and silences. As in the Wilkes production, Atkinson's storytelling shines most when it lingers with those who knew Merton best, that is, who knew him not as a famous writer, porcelain saint, or mystical pioneer, but as "an ordinary guy who drank too much beer" (poet Ron Seitz), as the meticulously prepared and often quite funny teacher of novices (Br. Maurice Flood), or as the celibate hermit whose carefully tended solitude was broken open ecstatically and painfully by a love affair with a young nurse (Dr. Anthony Padovano). Indeed, both in narrative substance and in style the film takes a number of welcome risks that distinguish it markedly, if not always favorably, from the Wilkes production. The use of free-form jazz as soundtrack largely succeeds in underscoring the restlessness and creativity of Merton's life, a major theme of Soul Searching. The use of actors to dramatize turning points, as in the aforementioned affair, works well when employed with minimalism (as in Merton's encounter with Gilson's The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy), but distracts when it tries too hard for dramatic effect (I confess that the hospital scenes with the nurse, while not gratuitous, struck me initially as slightly weird, even comical; repeated viewings warmed me considerably.) But most striking is the skill with which Atkinson, through haunting cinematography and daring editing, draws us into the tensive paradoxes and apparent contradictions of Merton's (and thus our own) inescapably human journey. I say "apparent" because, if Merton's life illustrates anything, it is the relationship in authentic Christian spirituality between friendship with God (mysticism) and love for the world of human beings (prophecy). With soft-spoken guidance from several of Merton's former novices (Abbots Flavian Burns and John Eudes Bamberger), Atkinson probes Merton's twin calls to both solitude and solidarity, helping us to understand why, at least for Merton and his brother monks at Gethsemani, this pairing is no contradiction. Nowhere is the "attunement of opposite tensions" (or sapientia, the way of wisdom) more perfectly realized for me than in the film's treatment of Merton as "pastor of the peace movement" in the 1960s, those years in which, as Lawrence Cunningham remembers, "we were having a collective nervous breakdown in this country." In what for me is the film's most arresting sequence, Atkinson juxtaposes newsreel footage of the fire-hosing of civil rights demonstrators with scathing excerpts from Merton's "Letters to a White Liberal"; moments later, a still shot of the hermitage transfigured in dawn light is set against footage of a nuclear blast ripping through the natural landscape, like so much dust. "When I pray for peace," intones Merton's narrated voice, "I pray not only that the enemies of my own country will cease to want war, but above all that my own country will cease to do things that make war inevitable. . . . If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed, but hate these things in yourself, not another." Merton had indeed become, as Jesuit John Dear observes, a "dangerous" figure for Catholics who much preferred the pious persona and faith-world dualism of The Seven Storey Mountain. An aged Daniel Berrigan—whose moments on the screen merit the price of the DVD—remembers from the perspective of Catholic activists like himself and Dorothy Day: "It was a long, hard road, and we needed help along the way, and he gave it, he gave it. He was very important to all of us." That sentiment may be truer today than it was even five decades ago. Merton's Peace in the Post-Christian Era, quashed by his superiors in 1962...

New York Transfixed: Notes on the Expression of Fear

This article is about nine photographs and what may be seen in them (Figures 1–9). The images are part of a much larger collection conceived of and organized by a group of four friends—Alice Rose George, Gilles Peress, Michael Shulan, and Charles Traub— shortly after 11 September 2001. Their idea was to document what had happened and what was still occurring on the streets of New York City that infamous fall. The group also decided that this makeshift project should be open to ‘‘anybody and everybody’’ and they sent out word as widely as possible that any photograph submitted on this topic would be displayed in an exhibition at Michael Shulan’s SoHo gallery. Figure 1. Unknown photographer (#3029 from here is New York: a democracy of photographs).

A Chronicle for Our Time: Sergei Loznitsa's The Blockade (2006)

Blokada. Every Soviet citizen knew the true meaning of that unadorned word. It did not refer to any blockade, but the blockade, the siege of Leningrad. Soviet directors had tried to capture the siege's symbolic significance and emotional resonance in films ranging from Viktor Eisymont's touching 1944 melodrama Once There Was a Girl (Zhila-byla devochka) to Mikhail Ershov's four-part Brezhnevian epic The Blockade {Blokada, 1974-77). The artistic conundrum for directors who seek to capture unspeakable horrors on film is obvious; the cinematic lexicon seems wholly inadequate to express human tragedy on a large scale, whether the subject is the siege of Leningrad or the Holocaust; the slaughter of Armenians or the massacres in Rwanda. Reenactments?whether depicting the heartbreak of one, like that of little Nastia in Once There Was a Girl, or the heroicization of the many, as in Ershov's tale of the Hero-City?may be effective as entertainment or sometimes succeed as art. In the end, however, they never quite capture the horror, leaving filmmakers open to charges of trivialization, as was Steven Spielberg for Schindler s List.1 If greatness has eluded directors of fiction films about the siege, documentarists have fared no better. Conventional compilation documentaries, with their newsreel footage, still photographs, talking heads, portentous narration, and mood music, may seem more factual than their fictional counterparts, but they are not necessarily more authentic. The more pedantic and tendentious, the more likely such films are to lose the audience entirely. One recent exception to the relentless dullness of war documentaries is the television expose The Unknown Blockade (Neizvestnaia blokada, Maksim Ivannikov, 2004), which relies on exploiting the sensational aspects of the siege?the cannibalism, the government's purported plans to blow up the city?in ways that should make viewers a little queasy, even if they are riveted to the screen. Dziga Vertov's old dream of a new, truly revolutionary documentary cinema that would capture life unaware (zhizn' vrasplokh) has remained just that?a dream.

Newsreels in Nazi‐occupied Czechoslovakia: Karel Peceny and his newsreel company Aktualita

Newsreels in Nazi‐occupied Czechoslovakia: Karel Peceny and his newsreel company Aktualita

Mark Twain

Although the filmmaker Ken Burns often insists that he is not a historian, the collaboration between Burns and public television (PBS) has produced a body of popular history dealing with such diverse topics as the Civil War, the American West, baseball, jazz, Thomas Jefferson, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. To this collection has been added a nearly fourhour examination of the American literary giant Mark Twain. The Twain film follows the familiar Burns formula, well documented in Gary Edgerton's book Ken Burns's America (2001). Eschewing historical re-creations or Hollywood clips of films based on the works of Twain, Burns uses nineteenth-century mood music, newsreel footage, photographic stills, an omnipresent narrator, scholarly experts as talking heads, landscape photography, and actors (including David Conrad as the voice of Twain) reading the correspondence of historical figures. There is a companion coffee-table volume cowritten with Geoffrey Ward. Accordingly, there is little innovative in this Burns film, which will ultimately find its way into many history and literature classrooms at the secondary as well as the collegiate level. The film is essentially a celebration of Twain's life and work, supporting Ernest Hemingway's assertion that American literature began with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Indeed, there is little examination of American letters before or after Twain's career, and Burns fails to use Twain's brilliant lampoon of the turgid prose employed by James Fenimore Cooper.

Within the Veil of Interdisciplinary Knowledge? Jefferson, Du Bois, and the Negation of Politics

In a once revolutionary moment, interdisciplinarity seemed to possess liberatory potential. This moment might be reconstructed out of slogans and images from 1968. "Pluridisciplinarité et interdisciplinarité," proclaimed banners held by student marchers in Paris of that year. 1 The spirit of interdisciplinarity also appeared in the United States at this time in calls for Women's Studies, Black Studies, and Ethnic Studies. In the American republic of the 1790s conservatives feared that the destabilizing spirit of the French revolution would spread across the Atlantic, and almost two centuries after the fact French radicalism indeed emerged on college and university campuses, not as the terror of 1789, but as the social unrest of 1968. San Francisco State on Strike, a documentary film of the student movement that paralyzed the Bay Area campus for five months, suggests interdisciplinarity as radical consciousness. In the newsreel footage of protests that began in response to the university administration's failure to support Black Studies and ended with the creation of one of the first programs in Ethnic Studies, students and faculty voice their opposition to "discipline" in its several forms--in the form of police beating and corralling marchers, in the form of an academic curriculum that ignores the concerns of working-class and minority students, and in the form of a tracking system that as early as the third grade conditions segments of school populations for low-paying jobs and unemployment.

So Their Eyes Won't Glaze Over: How Television News Defined the Debate over the Smithsonian's Enola Gay Exhibit

So Their Eyes Won’t Glaze Over: How Television News Defined the Debate over the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay Exhibit Thomas Cripps (bio) Figures Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Opening title card from Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945. Photo courtesy Erik Barnouw. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Film still from Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945. Photo courtesy Erik Barnouw. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. “Enola Gay” on the plane’s fuselage: video frame from the “ABC Nightly News With Peter Jennings,” January 30, 1995. Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 4. “Enola Gay,” video frame of newsreel footage from the “NBC Nightly News,” August 30, 1994. Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 5. Video frame of Stanley Goldberg, on the “ABC Nightly News With Peter Jennings,” November 17, 1994. “Well,” he says slyly, “I guess I’m un-American then.” Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 6. Video frame of Barton Bernstein, on the “ABC Nightly News With Peter Jennings,” November 17, 1994. “Scandalous,” says Bernstein, but so fine is his subtlety that it is lost. Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 7. Video frame of Martin Harwit, from “Nightline,” October 25, 1994. “Well, primarily we’ve added more historical background and rounded it out that way.” Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 8. Video frame from “Nightline,” October 25, 1994. Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 9a. Video frames of Jack Giese and Martin Harwitt, on the “CBS Evening News,” September 25, 1994. Giese argues, “The exhibition does not have balance and context.... They portray Americans as the aggressors... even racist aggressor.” Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 9b. Video frames of Jack Giese and Martin Harwitt, on the “CBS Evening News,” September 25, 1994. Giese argues, “The exhibition does not have balance and context.... They portray Americans as the aggressors... even racist aggressor.” Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 10a. Video frames from “Nightline,” October 25, 1994. Herman Harrington (left) and Hugh Dagley. Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 10b. Video frames from “Nightline,” October 25, 1994. Martin Harwitt (left) and Michael Heyman. Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 11. Video frame from “Nightline,” October 25, 1994. Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 12. Video frame of William Detweiler, on the “ABC Nightly News with Peter Jennings,” January 30, 1995. Detwiler proposes the Smithsonian “...bury all this historiographical stuff in a ‘seminar’ where it belongs.” Courtesy the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University. The semicentennial of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945 has come and gone—and with it the opportunity for thoughtful Americans to view a sweeping Smithsonian exhibition of it. The curators had intended to celebrate the contribution of the aircrew of the B-29 bomber, Enola Gay, to the urgent matter of shortening the final Pacific phase of World War II as well as assessing the impact of the bombing as an initial event of the atomic age. However, the exhibition fell victim to an angry skirmish in the American culture wars of the late twentieth century. As Congressman Newt Gingrich (R-GA), only just taking on the post of Speaker in a Republican-dominated House, told a conference of state governors: “The Enola Gay fight was a fight, in effect, over the reassertion by most Americans that they are sick and tired of being told by some cultural...

From the Tomb of Stanislaus to the Tomb of Peter: A Preface

From the Tomb of Stanislaus to the Tomb of Peter: A Preface I want to describe die Church, my Church, which bound itself to my land (this was said: "Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven"), dius to my land my Church is bound. The land lies in die Vistula basin, the tributaries swell in spring when the snows thaw in die Carpathians. The Church bound itself to my land so that all it binds here should be bound in heaven. —John Paul II, "Stanislaus" The word, before it is ever spoken on the stage, is already present in human history as a fundamental dimension of man's spiritual experience . Ultimately, the mystery of language brings us back to the inscrutable mystery of God himself. As I came to appreciate the power of the word in my literary and linguistic studies, I inevitably drew closer to the mystery of the Word—that Word of which we speak Logos 1:2 1997 From the Tomb of Stanislaus to the Tomb of Peter every day in the Angelus: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn 1:14). —John Paul II, Mystery and Gift Of the thousands of photographs and images that abound of John Paul II both before and after his election to the papacy, three are especially poignant. Each tells a different story, reveals a different dimension of the man. But each shares a common dramatic theme of solicitude. Two are quite well known (they have been reprinted or re-telecast often enough that even the most casual follower of this papacy will recognize them); the third is lesser known. The first image captures John Paul II in a dramatic moment of reconciliation with his would-be assassin Ali Agca in Rebibbia Prison on 27 December 1983. Some photographs of the event show the Pope and Agca seated and huddled in intimate conversation . The photograph reprinted in His Holiness:John Paul II and the Hidden History ofOur Time—the one to which I am primarily referring —shows the two standing; Agca has placed his head in the Pope's right hand and the Pope's left rests onAgca's back in a drawing -in gesture.1 As G. H.Williams observes, The published photograph of the confidential exchange between the Christian victim-priest and the repentant Muslim assassin-by-intent served globally among Catholics and others as a powerful icon of penance in the confessional and absolution and in this case ofextraordinary , exemplary mutual reconciliation.2 In the second image, Stefan CardinalWyszinski, the Primate of Poland, kneels before the just-invested John Paul II and before he can pledge his fidelity, the Pope stands, raises (practically hoists) him up, and embraces him. This image is more than a sentimental Logos one; it is more than one ofjust gratitude to a former superior and fellow bishop. It is an acknowledgment of all the suffering that the Church and Polish nation has endured and of the many sacrifices Wyszinski has made on behalfofthe cross and the eagle. So touching is the moment that Herbert Wise, the director of the 1983 movie about John Paul II (starring Albert Finney), felt it could not be just enacted; and thus, toward the end, the film shifts to the grainy news-reel footage of the procession of cardinals; at the moment of the embrace the frame freezes and the film blooms once again into a color enactment of the moment.3 This bit is technically inferior to the bright colors, sharp images, and sophisticated camera work of the rest of the film, but it exceeds all else in its drama, authenticity, and hope. It shows not a pontiffbut a devoted son of Poland. Unlike the first two images that have been singled out, the third captures a comparatively ordinary moment.4 The scene is a nondescript room in the Catholic University of Lublin in 1967. At a table sits Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, pen in hand, bent with concentration over some pages, which are partially obscured by a portfolio at the front. At Wojtyia's right—to the left of the photograph —is Professor Teresa Rylska. What is unusual is that the...

Intergroup violence and intergroup attributions

Pettigrew's (1979) prediction that relative to in-group behaviour, negative out-group behaviour would be attributed to internal characteristics, was tested in the context of Northern Ireland's continued conflict. Catholic and Protestant respondents were presented with newsreel footage depicting scenes of in- and out-group violence. One showed a Protestant attack on mourners at a Catholic funeral. The other showed a Catholic attack on a car containing two plain clothes soldiers at a Catholic funeral. Using a free response format, subjects' explanations were classified into internal and external attributions. The results showed strong support for Pettigrew's hypothesis. The implications of these findings with regard to the maintenance of intergroup conflict are discussed.