newcritics

One of the tasks that has kept me busy over the last few weeks has been teaching a senior-level seminar course on the theme “Documenting Injustice.” The course examines various strategies and debates about the role of documentary practices (written, photographic, and filmic) in depicting various forms of injustice, and one of the issues I was most interested in addressing is the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, the potential for non-fictional or documentary elements to infuse what is otherwise a fictional film, how they come to define our historical memory of the Iraq War, Vietnam, or the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Ross McElwee explores this idea in his brilliant documentary, Bright Leaves, in which he postulates that the Gary Cooper movie, Bright Leaf, may have been about a distant relative. But one of the more compelling examples of this blurring between fiction and documentary is Haskell Wexler’s underrated film, Medium Cool, which focuses on TV news reporter John Cassellis (Robert Forster) as he awakens to the ways in which television news broadcasts numb their audiences to the violence and conflict taking place in the world. But the film’s relatively loose plot is primarily a vehicle through which Wexler was able to document and place in a social and historical context the protests that took place outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Medium Cool was, somewhat famously, buried by Paramount when it was released in 1969, in large part because of the film’s controversial politics and its challenging narrative structure. The film’s most powerful sequence takes place near the end of the film when John and his girlfriend, Eileen (Verna Bloom), an Appalachian woman who has moved to Chicago for work, search for Verna’s son while the protests take place around them. As they wander through the crowds, looking for the son, history unfolds around them, and Wexler takes us away from our identification with characters and narrative, in part through the soundtrack that emphasizes news reporting over the “personal” storyline (for a great reading of the film that covers these points in greater detail, see Michael Renov’s The Subject of Documentary).

I’ve been thinking about Medium Cool a lot lately, in part because I’m teaching it, but also because the film’s treatment of history and documentary would seem to inform the debates about Brian DePalma’s Redacted and the decision to remove some documentary photographs from the film’s final montage (see, for example, the Siren’s post and my own). I haven’t been able to see the movie yet, and probably won’t be able to see it as DePalma intended, but the debates about DePalma’s use of Iraq War photographs seem to be less about copyright and more about how these images function culturally.

Certainly, there are ownership issues, but as Jim Emerson suggests, in a compelling post on this issue, “ownership” when it comes to certain photographs, becomes an incredibly sticky issue, especially when those photographs are as politically charged as the Abu Ghraib photographs or other famous Vietnam War photographs. Do the photos belong to the photographer? To the news service? To all of us? I realize that in a legal sense, there may well be an easy answer to some of these questions, but it seems clear that Redacted, and in a slightly different way, Medium Cool, complicate that issue in some way.

I mention Emerson not only because his comments speak to the issues raised by Redacted but also because the example that he raises, Woody Allen’s use of Eddie Adams’ famous Vietnam era photo, “General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon” in Stardust Memories, which prompts his question about ownership. While watching Medium Cool the other night, I was surprised to discover that Wexler, too, had used the same photograph, the image displayed briefly on the wall of Cassellis’s loft apartment. Other photographs circulate in a similar way in the film: a shot of a Beatle with a peace dove on his shoulder, a photo of Martin Luther King and another of Bobby Kennedy. While all of these photos initially appear in the background, they seem to set the stage for the film’s penultimate scene as we watch history unfold, engulfing John and Eileen in its stream.