Reading Notes: The Intersectionality of Labor and Memory

Readings: Rabinowitz, Paula. “Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory.” History and Theory 32 (1993): 119-137.

Rabinowitz's thesis claims that documentary cinema can be "intimately tied" to historical memory. It can "reconstruct historical narrative. . . but often functions as an historical document itself"  (This reminds me of Oliver Stone movies for example)

1945 - Footage pulled together by British Ministry of information into film, Memory of the Camps - it was never released because of the graphic images. 

The british govt supprised it. It was recovered in the 1980s and was on television for Frontline

Shocking moment when the "blond children play before a bavarian cottage. . and the "camera pans through the trees to reveal barbed wire and piles of flesh and bones"

The documentary was supposed to help keep this in the public's memory. It was supposed to "freeze time" so we could remember later. 

The relationship between documentary and history and memory - - 

history relies on documents to support its narrative

documentary is mean tot instruct through evidence

poses truth as a moral imperative (p. 121)

P. 123 

Documentary crosses the boundry into anthropology  - - Nanook of the North

 Anthropologists are meant to just observe, but Flaherty intervened... so much that we learn to discover later that he set up scenes. 

--

Cinema Verite... "critiques fired at the direct cinema movment was its lack of social context - it's naturalizing of the viewing process" (. 125)

1960 s Primary - - "Solanas and Getino Advocated a cinema which intervened in history"  

"Battle of Chile - - infamous sequence ending the first section. Argentianean camerman films his own death after refusing to heed commands of an army officer to cease shooting" 

"The distinction between history and its representation in the documentary vanishes"

1985 release of Claude Lanzmans 9 hour and 23 minute documentary of rememrance, Shoah.  What? Woa.  He insisted his film is art despite it wrecking any boundry or previous instance of documentary film.  Reading Roger Ebert's review of the film gutted me. I need to see this film. 

 - documentary "sought to re-present reality - through the precise selection of objects surveyed by the camera and the sounds recorded by the microphone

P. 130

Two modes of presenting the real

 - the survey of objects

- the disclosure of subjectibity

Malcom X - spike lee begins film with credit sequence that intercuts Rodney King videotape with Malcom X's rhetoric. 

The Real is intermixed with the "fictionalised"... confusing to some. 

Another example - Madonna Truth or Dare"  

Uses "conventions of documentary", but the "Verite is not the truth, but Madonna's truth. She is "always performing"

-- Political docs - 

Historical doc, "not only tells us about the past, but asks us to do something as well. 

Examples - The Civil War... show's us the horror of war but wanrs us to remember too. 

Back to Lanzmann - - He "refused to use the cliched images of camps by the ss" - he asked the rough questions...