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togetherask us to pause and ponder-and indeed relativize-suchtransformationsand ways ofseeing them in the shadow ofpast texts, conceptions, practices, andinstitutions.I am grateful to my Concordia colleagues on Visible Evidence Organizing C o m m i t t ~ e , Martin Allor, Dan Cross and ElizabethMiller, as well as oursterlingdoctoral-level collaborator Gerda Cammaer, for helping make the publication ofthis sampling of Viz Ev XII ventures in documentary historiography possible. Theconference could not have happened without the financial support of ConcordiaUniversity's Faculty of Fine Arts, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Office of th ePresident, and Centre interuniversitaire en arts mediatiques, as well as the generouscontribution of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.We are'most grateful to all of these units, as well as to CJFSjRCEC editor WilliamWees for his generous help with editing these texts and to the journal for allowingus this important podium.THOMAS WAUGH teaches film studies at ConcordiaUniversity, Montreal, wherehe has also developed an interdisciplinary curriculum around AIDS and in queerstudies. Among his publications are The Romance of 1tansgression in Canada:Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas (2006) and "Show Us Life": Towards aHistory and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary (1984). 'TWo volumes ofhis writing on documentary are forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press.

4 THOMAS WAUGH

JANE M. GAINES

DOCUMENTARY RADICALITY

Resume: Les photographies du ({ Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (1911) de New York,qui circulaient sous forme de pastels diascopiques, et les images animees des travailJeurs de la" Westinghouse Electric and ManUfacturing Company (1904), produitespar I'American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, permettent de repenser Ie cinemaradical selon Ie concept de la " radicafisation " derridienne. L'auteur va au-deja deC.S. Peirce;, et Ie contourne, pour identifier dans Je documentaire radical une indexicalitemarxiste qui suggere que ce qui a ete perdu au niveau de [a connexion indexicale-la causa[ite - depuis I'arrivee des medias digitaux existe toujours dans la theorie dela production sociaIe de I'oe'uvre qui est Jiee a sa temporalite historico-materielle.

In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida's reflections on the end of Marxism,. heasks, "But what does 'to radicalize' mean?" He goes on: "It is not , by a longshot, the best word. Jt does indicate a movement of going further, of course, andof not stopping. But that is the l imit of it s pert inence Thepoin twould be notto progress st il l fur ther into the depths of radical ity while taking a step in thesame direction." Derrida, it would seem, is cautioning against going down thesaII1e roan again. But while he doesn' t want us to proceed in the same old wayinto the "depths of radicaJity," he returns again and again to what he cal ls the"spirit of Marx," a spirit that still haunts the globe.l The specter's "hauntology,"its coming back, going, and corning back again, would seem to do with the historical "deja vu," the repetition of the moment at the beginning of the 1950s, or,a second "end of communism. "2 He is implicated, we are implicated as the "heirsofMarx andMarxism," our legacy notonly a project but a "promise," andnot onlya philosophical project. 3 Beyond the performance of the "radicalization" or theradical critique, that is, beyond deconstruction, which Derrida sees as a radicalization of Marxism itself, the spirit of Marx is there in the reminder of that partof the project which is the production of events, that is, "new effective forms ofaction, practice, organization. "4

Further, in Derrida, and to get closer to our topic, this momentous secondend of communism has also been coincident with and is thus seemingly oneamong other "ends ofthings," whether the "end ofhistory," the "end of ideologies,"

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or the "end of the greatemancipa tory discourses." But, he goes on, these areends that should remind us of what it is that has not been ended. Why proclaimthese ends, he says, when there is still no end of world suffering? In a surprisingly passionate passage, Derrida implores us to leave offcelebrating these ends,and ins tead, "Let us never neglect this obyious microscopic fact, made up ofnumerous singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignoretha t never before, in absolute f igures, never have so many men, women, andchildren been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth."s Let us not.Neither let us miss the connection Derrida makes between the end of the emancipatory discOl.j.rses phd the multiplication of sites of suffering, the effect of thetermination of the one seen in the proliferation of the other. But this intimationof consequence relies on a crucial reverse causal connection, a connection thatcould only'be made in the light of the historical legacy of Marxism as not only"answering': the plight of the downtrodden but as a theory providing the analytical answer as well as the antidote-socialism.

Perhaps then Derrida's call to "never neglect" is a tribute to the resilienceof the Marxist lightning narrative of social transformation, which goes somethinglike this: material conditions cause consciousness change causes social rebellioncauses society changed. And yet this theory of social transformation needs constant reassessment. In the following, we willwant to know if "radicalize," althoughnot, as Derrida thinks, the bestword for whatever it is thathappens, has somethingto do with the relation between the great Marxist emancipatory discourses andthe "obvious microscopic fac t" composed of "si tes of suffering." This is therelation addressed here as that between evidence and aspiration, the evidence ofmaterial conditions and the aspiration to transform the world.6 Finally, this fortuitous connection will be wrapped into what I call the question of a possibly" Marxist indexicality as it relates to s ti ll and motion photography, s itua ted inanswer to what became known in film theory as the "critique of realism."?

Clearly evidence and aspiration are only two aspect s of a complex set ofdeterminations tha t we would want to ask about in any attempt to discuss thepoliticization of consciousness around historical events, this, an accepted way ofreferencing, for instance, the "radicalization" of work force. One wondershow far the concept of radicalizehas evolved from an earlier meaning which hasto do with rootedness, as in its botanical or mathematical usage. Derrida, as wasMarx, is interested in the radix or root by which things should be grasped, butnow the root stands for questions about the ontology ofMarxism itself. It is eventhe root, orthe radical (sometimes "fundamental" or "originary") thatmight "callfor questions" aboutMarxism in the discourses that "call themselves Marxism."8The radical would then seem to require the genealogical. But also, these are theconditio'ns of the hauntology, the goings and comings, which means tha t thequestion of documentary radicality is inevitably a study in elusive appearances,legacies, and finally returns.

6 JANI M. GAINES

Figure 1. "Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire," New York City,March 25, 1911 (newspaper photograph).Brown Brothers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library.Let us then raise the specter ofMarx, the hovering specter that enables the

linkage between the historical-microscopic evidence of social conditions and theaspiration for something better. In the interests of the hauntology let us considerimages from two moments in the American labor past, from 1911 and 1904, .taken in reverse chronological order-one, an early media event, a most obviousand microscopic moment in U.S. history, and the other the production of earlyfactory film footage. There are few events more hauntological than the 'ItiangleShirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911. Soon after the outbreak of the fire, photographersfrom the New York City newspapers rushed to the scene of mayhem and sorrow,on that site producing the images that would so immediately stir the city. In themonths following, the Triangle Fire photographs became a factor in the radicalization of New York's female work force, helping to tell the following story as astory of the exploitation of labor by capital.On Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, near closing time, a fire broke outon the ninth floor ofthe Ash Building in New York City. Garment workers at theTriangle Shirtwaist Company were trapped on that floor. What happened to themwas the direct consequence of management policy, a policy that indica ted agreater concernwith potential theft than withworker safety. The managementhadlocked the exit doors , and the fire escape had buckled in the heat. Of the fivehundred company employees, one hundred and fifty-five died as a consequenceof the entrapment. Some w ~ r e burned alive on the shop floor and others died asthe result of injuries sustained from jumping out the window onto the pavementnine floors below. Soon in circulationwere black and white photographic imagesof their bodies heaped like abused garments on the sidewalk (Figure 1). The

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DOCUMiliNrAllY RADlCALlTY 9

is also where the extra appeal to the senses reminds us of Marx's"sensuous hU!lliln activity," no isolated reference. but, as a challenge

lew'ing the Unfortunates at the M o r g \ J e , ~ New YOI City, March, 19t1 (hand-tintedsli

a tableau and stimulating its sense testimony, places the image in anotherregister. Likewise, the magic lantern show series elongates the familyaftermath of the Triangle fire. enlarging the impact on Iheimmigraot. Such enhancements contribute to what I have elsewhere, wilh reference's revolutionary pathos, called tile documentary "pathos of facL"[2

suffering rendered as sights of suffering are made all the more poignanta paradoxical supplement to their apparent microscopic factuality, An earlierto documentary wou.ld find dishonesty in the affective aesthetics of fic-suspicion of sentiment, held in low esteem, in contrast with the sober

of theblack andwhite photograph, but in taki11g this position wencomfortably aligned with a very Gliersonian moralism. Howeverthese photographic images participate in waves of semiosis, sigty ofthe New York sweatshop, the plight of female workers, thelilies, as well as lhe rumbling public outrage. The daub of fleshly failed realism, is finally redundant ill an image that ral ls

we locate il exactly where photographk realism both fallseeds Hs political rhetorkal goal. where it flatly states and over-

I'\tt1l:'\lmeiming majority who lost their lives were young immignmt women. ana ' l / I . l g ~ I c i t g e of nineteen, many ofwhom were at the time supportingtheir italian

fiimilies with the small wages they earned.\!se, a publicfuneral and march that drew one hundred and twentywas organized by the international Ladies Garment Workers

U.) and the Women's ihlde Union League (VlT.U.L.). Clearly,a rallying cry for thesetwo groups, which had successfully orga

women industrial workers fot tile frrst time In 1909 and secured a worksafely agreementwith manufacturers. The'liiiingleCompany, however. haded to sign the agreti'me:nt and the unions lost no opportunity to implicate

them. In the history of the American labor movement. the fire was understoodintheciassic sense as a radicalizing event, having it s dramatic consequence in

law reform in the sta te of New York. But here our subject is the politicalengine ofthe photographic Image. appearing relatively early in the history of themass circulation ofseusations for the eye,when the vehicles of distribution weremore uneven and d i ~ e r s e than we might have imagined. Testimony to uneventechnological development, another set of'Iliangle Fireimages exemplify the pr'cinematic magic lantern sUde show that continued after the advent of cinema.Considering the hand-colored images of bodies in t he morgue from a mag iclanternslide show series, we want to gauge the values added to the photographicsign, Rather than dismissing the magic lantem show as either a t e c h n o l o g l ~ a !holdover or an aesthetic throwback to Victorian sentiment, it must here pass Itspolitical test, no! in spi te of but because of i ts emotional appeals . And sincerecently film studies has been asked to understand whatrealism does for melodrama,wewould want, reciprocally, to ask what melodramatization does for the politicala$;pirations of photographic realism, The short answer to this quest ion is tha t.

~ r 1 ' U y t o all assumptions about emotion as engendering powerlessness andmlJtwbUity, in the history of American melodrama, "sentiment enables actlon."llJ

"Viewing the Unfortunates at the Morgue" (Figure 2), aile of a number ofphotlilgraplllc still images of the morgue interior that were in circulation, here asan illustrated lecture, calls lnto question the valence of the non-photoFor instance, the original was hand colored, which may at firstJilsprodudng an obviously fake realism. The gruesome scene has been

hastily, but awkwardly. "touched up," that is, the images of the corpsesant wornen (not the corpsesthemselves) havebeen daubed with

shade ton orange. The coloring is disconcertingly false,sorrowfulscene. a wrong notethat

ne as a sign of early apoliticalThe arrangementof the row of open c

as the factory assembly lineitself, and inMem as cruelly exploited as they were in life. ButpoUtica! martyrdom change this reading?


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ru;;tonIy"analysis"but with "pmctice."llLater, Ernst Blochsame passage as positit:lg the "pathos of 'revolutionary'"1';;A fuller development of the possibilities within ft scn

find there moredialectical room, find perhaps thethe sensale aud the rool "suffering" in the pathetic.I; In the

im4ge, expression, arousal, and suffering are bound together, thesuffering held to be synonymous with "viewing the unfortunatespathos,16 Butwhere is our original question? II may seem that we

b 3 ' ~ ~ ~ ! t t ~ y o o from the conjunctnre of theevidence of conditIons and the aspirationto < i ) . a n g E ~ t b e m . But surprisingly we are brought closer to this nexus, brought backto question because the::fr iangleFire images testify to the insurmountabledistance between the evidence of oppression and the imagination of a betterwodd" As these images indicate and magnify they stand for the enormity of therlifliculty of overturning, a difficulty signified in the plight of the immigrant. workers whose only way out ofthe burning sweatshop was to leap to thepavementThe'ltiangle Company's exploitation of female immigrant workers is here sImultaneously proven and dtarnatized. Yet anger, analysis, and proteststill havetoconjured out of the events to which the photographic imagesare the perfect Witness, Most importantly for the poHlicization of consciousness, alit of these eventsnU.l$t CQme theirGlltLtllesis, For a Marxist ontology must answer industrial disaster(the disaster of the garment industry's brutal extraction of value from immigrantlabor) with the discourse of emancipation, the contenlS of which is a concreteulopiani.sm,

Ernst Bloch, the lone Marxist theorist of the utopian, has done the most tofill out politic.al c o ~ c l o u s n e s s as what he called "anticipatory consciousness,"antIcipation understood in relation to hope, which he insisted was a "mllltantQPtimism.'m The authenticity of hope is here developed as against vague wishingllUleomrnensurate with dreams of an absolutely possible better world, and an

e ~ e d horizon of expectation, Relevant for us, Bloch seems to make utopian_l1tm11ton contingent on theexperience of intolerable social conditions. In Bloch,~ l n g h a n d in hand with the ~ k n o w l e d g e of how bad the world is," is tl le

~ a ( ~ p . w I e d g r n , e n t of how good it could be if it were otherwise, Thus far. how~ 1 ( i ! X ... l'IO(;l:l'$ uliUtyin film theory has been limited to studies of music and the

an acknowledgement that his theory is overdeveloped on thesforming dream, the optimism that imagined and expected

more may be derived from his broad understanding of revolu,interest,even if we only begin by findIng, following him, that

is lidded to the photographic as pictures begin to move, IIImay be depicted in "wishing pictures/ and even associatedtecbnology," where ~ p l c t u r i n g " is always a "plcturi.ngIn the work of film history, however, we would have 10 say

movement is not harnessed to revolutionary cause until thl,l:

Soviet social experiments of the I920s, most notably seen In the early workaJ'llzl!$!Vertav ilnd Sergei Eisenstein, long the historical measure of radical ClntllUa,

Yet the challenge remains to investigate what motion contributed to thesocial lntert'st of the nOt yet radical nor even documentary mode of theactoolitf!(the view or vile), conventionally assigned 10 the period 1895.,..1917 Jl We would


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the great emancipalOry discourses,". , We have recently wondered a great dealabout the ascendanc' of the digital over tlle photographic image, but cause formore concern should be the ascendance of the digJtal and the perceived demiseof Marxism worldwide,35 I! may be "just a coincidence," and then again, it Iflaynot be, because what we am desclihing here is nothing if not "hauntologu:aL"

So I 'm using this felt loss and hypothetical "end" as a justification for talkingabout Marxist indexlcaWy ,1S a way into the problem of the historical relationbetween documentary and radicaHty, toward index, genealogy, and action, anda way of confronting two fell losses. Ideally, a theory of Marxist indexlcalitywould also help to define the tradition that has encompassed such classic black

white political films as Strike (USSR, 1924, Sergei Eisenstein), Las Hurdes!Lt111dWithoutBrerui (Spain, 1932,Luis Bunue!) ,AHsi:re au Borinage (Belgium, 1933,llt!slvens and Henri Storck), Brickmakers (Mexico, 1972, Martha Rodriquez),and Union Maids (USA, 1976, Julia Reichert and Jim Klein). One needs to begin,Mwever, even before Strike and the Soviet revolutionary tradition, to step back

ask why moving images have historically been claimed so readny and sotely for socialist and Leftist projects, What exaclly was Jt about theprivileged (Indexical) connection of motion photography to the teem.world?H We have already seen that indexical privilege contributes

ing to one of the forks ofthe radical cause-the evidence of material con.Yet there IS something starkly missing that Marxist theory strives to addis made to move. lndexicality names photographic privilege and

to shore up a chain of causa li ty, but stops short of the compositelesson it gestures toward.us take another route, holding Marxist theory at its word, emphasizing

!lons are determined by the economic oase, among other things,eS1Zl:' tha t the mOVing image that depicts working conditions is, inan object lesson in the Marxist concept of determination, tentatively,to considerthe production of images-in-motion out of the still image.

allows us to raise the quest ion of the best expecta tions ofin relatIon to the dominance of the moving image aetua/ite

lJue), i n t he first decades of the twentieth century, IneVitably andthis becomes a quest ion of the earliest factory filmK 36 By factory

we would not mean the first IndmHrial r elations film, theLeaving the Factory (France, 1895), significant, as it has beenS llepi'j:;tl'on of cheerful workeffi leaving the plant But here theus with an ,1hnost insurmountable research question, per-

uence of a suspicious attraction-repulsion, For while the movingwould appear to be at first enamored with other machines, that

of the cinemacentury, over thecourse of that century, thewould seem to develop an increasing antipathy to industrialtha t ls, to worJu"rs'i\t-work, German radical filmmaker Hamn

{ N j \ ~ ~ ~ $ t l ? W ! , l k a j r e ~ ~ , , , : , l I l U t ~ ' " evidentiary sign par excellence.16 The photographicbodies themselves, also a Peirda "pointing finger," indicating

' . ~ ~ r ~ t e n l e i g f i l l l ~ e l 1 f " the 1'riangle Company as the source of the fire that caused~ h l e ' d l e a t i b s l ( ) f the young immigrant women. If the photographic so indisputablyplJIJ1ts.what more could be achieved politically by putting the photographic stillintomotion? Onewould need to follow the moment into its progression, tracingthatmt;ment as it ismade to mt;ve, as it disappears into themoving image. And:Wewould want movement tu come back out again, perhaps in the form of bodiesnow mobilized, enactingwhat I have elsewhere called Ule poliUml mimetic, thatis, energized "hody h a c k ~ effects, translated into actions in and on the world,into the production of new events.17

Before we can begin to speak of actit;ns in the world, h o w ~ e r , we need toaddress thtt issueof our own representational relations to that world, to the socialworld "in which. Thus I would be remiss not to comment further on Derrida'sreference to an "obviously microscopic fact, madtt upo f numerous, singular sitesof suffering," this, from the theorist in whose name the knowability of just suchphenomena has often been questioned, This, from one of the major inspirationsfor the skepticism of the politics of tumJl1g the camera on an empirical world, sooften, beginning ill the 1970s, articulated as Ihe preferred politics of a criticalmodernism}S So I shomd confess that I 'm using the Derrida of Specters oft,tarxasa way around theproblem of how 10 represent sites of suffering as really existing, but also to ask if it was perhaps less a Derridian than an Althusserian prohibition that underwrote the "critique of r e a l ! s m ~ in film theory. This is also,withont breaking entirely with useful realisms, to stoke the fiJe of critique withina newer documentary film theory. For while Altlmsser has recently been submitted to re-examinatlon along these lines, the assertion that ~ t h e real" is alwaysideological is still absolutely foundalional and not an assertion that we wouldwant to abandon.z9 Still, in theMarxist tradition, the real historical trumpseverything, Even after the Althusserian challenge to the experiential, as always, as in

M ~ x a n d Engels, the ideological is countered by real, active men on the basis ofreal life-process}O My discussion, then, coming after, and indebted 10, the

ar"''''.'''''''''''.'' of the "cr it ique of rea lism," should be taken as a subtle "cr it iqueioJ1tUMZI'it1(lUeof realism,"o r Marxist indexicallty and itsdiscontents. That is notaJl.Ll?E!rlliIOS,While wea re a t it, we should also begin to consider how the resur

g ~ n ~ t o l ' a c a d l : m i c references to the photographicindex might be part ofthis ~ c r i the critique of realism. ".!

) i U > < ~ M j n i W ( l i t ! l ) n to the interest in the index as a theoretical alternativeto thation d ~ e l o p m e n t that shouldinterest us more, a develin the termination of the indexical connection to the

more monumental turn of things which should. This is the coinc idence of the felt loss of

and the loss of Marxism, referencing Derrida's "end of

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Figure 3. Girls Winding Armature (frame en!agemenls),Anwrkafl Mutosmpe dfld Biogmph Co" )904.

return to the worker with the foreman wearing a suit and a bowier hat. With theforeman watching, the matron takes the seat of thc worker while theother :;[;lnds,

if we hypot hes ize thai actions are "for l he camera," we still n:ahzeIhal wc are the miHlagi?mei1t the matron who enforcesrules and procedures, and suddenly belore us is revealed an d i s ~ll'rimination, We could evcn tooK at Girls Wiwl1n.li Armatures enQugh 19

to see the hand of the male foreman on the shoulder the fenwle workerat: her machine. Here is whf'l'c the docuIni?ntary camera, moving insiderelations, anticipates the tradition of what J C,iI! "stalking" the contradic-f rou look al social relations long the in's terms the "simple" contradiction, lhat between Labor and

Farceki, commenting on research for hiS experimental documentary, ArbeiterVertassen Die H ~ b r i k ; W ( ) r k e r s Leaving thel'actory (Germany, 19951, notes theincommensurability between the camera and the shop floor. li is 110t just that notradition of working Minside" the factory emerged wi th the familiar t rope ofMleaving" the faclOry, he says, but tha tby the end of the century the motion pictutl?, first altracted to, is now, in his terms, MrepeHed" by the factoryF

So we should be qui!elnterested in Girls Wifuiing Amwfures (figure 3), anexception found within it group of 1904 illlilgCS of the Westinghouse Electric andManufacturing Company, shot nine yearll after vVorken; Leaving the Factory, TheVv'estinghouse Works films an American MUlOscope aud Biographsedes of seventeen acrualiMs shot at the company plant in East Pit tsburgh,I'eIGmlVI'iarl.ia.by BmyBitzer, later renowned as D.W Griffith's cameratnan, Whilethe majority of these films are exterior public relations shotsof the Wt'stingbouseplant, five interior films depict women engaged in several phases of the machineproduction of electrical equipment. Girls Winding Arrnarures is dearly not in the"workers leaving the factory" tradition, amI it certainly has no relation to thewc:l,11 reform tradition of photographers Jacob Rils and Lewis Blue, to which 1have referred.is To stilrt to look for the rationale that explains the L'x!stence 01this remarkable exception, we would have to !Urn to the wide-ranglllg "show all"ambitions of view or vw; photograpby where the factory interior is perhaps allideal inadvertent cinema subject

The premise behInd theWestinghouse factory footage would appear to bethatthe electrical facwry shop floor is a nowpossible subject, newly discovered-notdifferent from any other modem buiIding interior, no longer"hidden from view)"tlOW explorable, by mution photography, Except that Ihe premise of the aetualitewas no t tha t one thIng, in the course of one minute, could bewrne another. InGirls Winding Amwtures, there is no anticipatioll that the subject that hegins asIIMxlem workplace organizallon would tum, in the process of filming, into any-

else, Yet here is where movement introduces, ever so gradually, and a s yetmlCJX!clXsmlcally, the possibility of seeing change {lver time, of watching processesand coooitiomi. everything in the workplace means showing mutethall ,rihe rotational motions of gl'amingmachinery-it means alSD showing thesilJ:lefllISl;Ay motIons, that is, the motions of superVising female electrical industry

' o t ; ~ r l \ t ; ' , t l L Of course the camera docs not set out to show supervlshJfl. That is theis ear ly in the evolution of the tradi tion tha t would become cinema

VlIW'I,f!i:,(!1!lC tradition in whleh the frame is effectively taken by surprise, Or. internlil1oilogy, where the "unexpected" has been framed. J9 In

the>re Is no such expectat!


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Capital, will reveal itself.40 Here, the advantage 'of the moving over the sti llimage, among other things, is in the spatialization of the relation of the workerto the machine, a spatialization now a perfect spectacularization of Labor-Capitalrelations, exploitation here expressed as a visiblespatial ratio. By visible ratio Imean that we see that there is sufficient space in the aisles for the foreman andthe matron to supervise, and'for shirt-sleeved men in bowler hats to push heavyspools down the aisle, but little space for the women workers sitting so straightlycorseted in tight rows to hammer and wind.

We do not know if the labor movement benefited from these views, but if itdid, reformers were delivered a portrait of working conditions only by virtue ofthe automatic exhaustiveness of the moving picture camera. Where capitalists wouldsee modern workplace organization and efficiency, union organizers would seein the view of the Westinghouse factory the lack of lighting on the shop floor aswell as the cramped spaces in which these women sat . But let us stop, here tonote the extra analytical step that we have taken. The moving camera not onlyautomatically delivers the view, but in its delivery ofthe space of the workplace,in its unflinching study of the turn of the nineteenth century workplace space, itcould be said to have also delivered analysis-political analysis, that is, of realhisto"rical productive relations, "Showing" gradually becomes "showing up," ina quite Althusserian-Brechtian sense.41 And thus it could be argued that the documentary camera, even in its earliest appearance, contra 1970s feminist film theory, beyond the controversial "capture," while it might not registerthe conditionsof its own production, could, under such circumstances, study the conditions ofindustrial production, here, most profoundly, gendered work.42. Here, in the context of the ques tion of material conditions causing con

sciousness changing causing rebellion and upheaval causing transformations ofthe social realm, we have a reverse of the consequential chain, the lightning narrative. Where the 1911 Triangle Fire images could correlate positively with theI.L.G,WU. and WT.U.O. organizing effort, in 1904, Girls Winding Armatures correlates negatively, not as the evidence of the working conditions which couldproduce the politicization which produces protest against the company, but asevidence of exploitation which did, and had. In 1903, the year before the company confidently invited the camera crew into the factory, workers had gone outon strike against the Westinghouse Company.43 Thus what weare seeing in theseimages are the newly hired workers who took the jobs ofthose who struck; andwe see themworking in unchanged, unimproved factory conditions. Butwait. Isn'tthis line of reasoning nothing more than the problematicassertion that the motionpicture camera captures the "truth of oppression"? And if this is the argument,then we have ignored the feminist critique of realism and its prohibition againstunderstanding the documentary camera as able to,"capture the truth of women'soppression."44 In retrospect, however, one wonders if the 1970s Marxist feministprotest against traditional documentary form on behalf of radical filmmaking as

16 JANE M. GAINES

formally deconstructive overshot its target. If the argument was that the worldwas social ly constructed, the asser tion that " truth could not be captured" (itcould only be constructed) was not finally necessary: For Marxism already hada theory, has had it all along, a theory which, going beyond any easy evidentiarytendency to capture or to finger-point (to which popular Marxism may perhapshave been historically inclined), returns us to the multiple density of determinations. The critique of realism, for all of its theoretical astuteness, took too muchfor granted a basic materialist premise-the rootedness of everything in the social.

So there is yet another way in which, based on and in the radical , we cansee documentafy moving images as lending themselves to political exigencies.This would be to find the radical in the radical, the radix, Such a project would. entail understanding moving images as claimed for radical, transformative politicsbecause within them, in'ihis tradition, the world is seen to be solidly rooted insocial situations, growing out of them and, most significantly, determined bythem; For th is rootedness I would finally turn back to a concept familiar toMarxist thought, but.it concept perhaps even more malignedthan the realism targeted by the 1970s cri tique: we should dare to return to reflection theory, Butreflection theory with a corrective, as suggestively worked out, for instance, during the Althusserian moment by Pierre Macherey. Here we would start from avery basic Marxist understanding that no phenomenon can be understood, asMacherey says, "in isolation from the material conditions which produce it. "45Starting here, with every phenomenon rooted in material conditions, we may besurprised to find the beginning of a return to that which has been consideredlost. To translate this into a reminder: before we participate in any nostalgia forindexicality, we should consider what we may have forgotten, better stated thusly:What we think wemay have lost in the indexical connection-causality-we neverlost in a theory of the social production of the work, still tied to its moment, comingout of that material moment so comprehensively in the end, or Marxist indexicality, without its discontents.

In the first decades of the last century, we would of course have encountered something that sounds like the idealism ofreflection theory-theinvestmentin a perfect identity between the image and the world. But there is good reflectiontheory and bad reflection theory, and what needs to be retained and strengthened from Marxist theory is a science ofthe work as somehow, as Macherey hasalso said, "subject to" or "answerable to," ifnot "determined by," external socialconditions,46 We recall of course the lessons of the Marxism thought to be toomechanically or "vulgarly" determining, modified, or corrected, beginning in the1970s, with layers of mediating institutionsY Often ignoring these layers,activism around radical film has historically posited not a multiple but only a double causality: social conditions as economically caused and the moving image asable to in turn cause the reversal of these conditions that cry out for change.While remaining skeptical of such unmodified determinism, we can still press

DOCUMENTARY RADICALITY 17

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the question of the polit ical quotient of the actualite. So the question forMarxism that the early dominance of the actualite puts on the table is whetheror not we can understand the'aspiration, not yet to transform, but to first graspthe social world in polit ical terms. In answer to this, I have suggested that intheir grasp, the Biograph views of the Westinghouse Works can be understoodas both embodied social relations and simultaneously their analysis.

With the problem of bad reflection theory behind us, it might finally be possible to say that in the apparently unnarrated actualiie, the social world "articulates itself" even that the actualite is produced by actuality. Now here is wherethe " C r i t i q ~ e o f realism" is countered byMarxist indexicalityand its discontents. Sincethere is a way in which social and economic determinations have been understood as contributive, we see that causality, any causality, would seem to supportan understanding of the social world as comprehensively caused (as opposed to"uncaused").48 For it is against a notion that things could be so arbitrary anduncaused that Marxism has historically stood. There is yet the danger that a comprehensive understanding of causality might be side-stepped as the photographicindex is seen only as a sign that respects the historical referent, the referent thatmakes its mark on the light-sensitive photographic strip. However, we have comesome distance from the concept of indexicality as taken from C.S. Peirce, first inthe early 1970s and more recently in documentary film theory, beginning aroundthe time of Bill Nichols's Representing Reality.49 Yes, we are aware that Peirce'stheory is a semiotics of things, and that as such it pertains more to objects thanconditions, to isolated signs rather than to c l u s t e ~ s ofsigns. And that it is notoriously quirky and uneven. While we wouldn't believe that we can ever have anyindexical guarantees that what was there is what was represented (our discontent), we should consider what the index does do for a political aesthetics.

The concept of the indexical (even givenits limitations) keeps alive the paradigm of economic and social causation. So Marxist indexicalitymay take something from the Peircian theory of indexicality but may more importantly pe ashortcut to the question of determinations. It was Althusser who once noted thatshortcuts in theMarxist theory of determinations had been taken at times in history for polemical or for pedagogical purposes.50 Here, we may think of the"pathos of fact" as pedagogical, and it is insofar as radicality is a pedagogy thatmay be aligned with productive overstatement, that is, with melodrama. Thesupreme political value of melodramatic hyperbole may be the boost it gives theportrayal of the need for swift change and the possibili ty of and the hope forawe-inspiring reversal. At least one theorist has characterized the social changepotentlal of motion photography as approaching the miraculous. In this'regard,political filmmaker 'and theorist Edgar Morin once said that ".. .it is perhaps indocumentaries that cinema utilizes its gifts to the maximum and manifests itsmost profound 'magical' powers."51 This, he sa id no t only with reference toRobert Flaherty and John Grierson, but also to Joris Ivens and Dziga Vertov.52

1B JANE M. CAINES

That documentary cinema has special powers we would not dispute,although it has been difficult through the necessary reign ofthe "critique of realism" to name the source of this power as the social world, or the experience ofliving in that world, or even the pressures of the world on representation. FromJean-Louis Comolli, co-author of the 1969 Cahiers du Cinema editorial so instrumental in the introduction of the critique of realism, we have more recently an"about face" in the form of an assertion ofwhat appears to be the opposite position. It is not that the real is always ideological but that it is finally determining.Thirty years after the Cahiers editorial Comolli says that "...the documentary filmdraws its power from its very difficulty, wholly derived from the fact that the realdoesn't give film the time to forget H, that thewortd presses on, that it is throughcontact with the world that cinema is made. "53 The real historical ever-changingtroublesome and contradictory social world would then be the essential root ofthe amazing cinematic analytic. It is"no wonder that Leftist theorists Andre BazinandSiegfried Kracauer were so impressed with documentarypower and so eagerto base their theories on the apparent special privilege of the cinematic sign vis-a-vis the world historical. That cinema is seen to be so close to it, so almost thesame as the world it references, tells us not just that its illusion is a success butthat the origin ofits power is the world it so successfully imitates, analyzes, andbrings to us. The degree to which the social world determines the cinematicimage of it is the degree to which it can be transformative of that same world.The source of the awesome magic, its political pathos, is a realism beyondreal-,ism, no longer just realism. The photographic image of the Triangle Fire disastervictims in the morgue swells to supplement itself. So we do not regret the loss ofthe index because its function has always been to magnify as much as to indicate,even as we understand that historically it has magnified because it indicates.

As heirs of Marx and Marxism, let us not forget the radical, the root thatprepares the political moment, that has assured the connection between materialconditions, class struggle, and world liberation, in movement rhetoric, in speeches,and in song. 54 That these conditions are the basis for change, their transformationproduced out of them, is after all a given in the "great emancipatory discourses"to which Derrida refers, where one hears echoes of Marx, Engels, Lenin, andMao Tse-tung.NOTESThanks to Rod Frey for editorial help, Tom Waugh for brilliant advice, WilliamWees for attention to detail.1. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debe the Work of Mourning, and theNew International, Peggy Kamuf, trans. (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 184 n . 9 .2. Ibid., la, 14.3. Ibid., 9 1.4. Ibid.,89, 92.



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10.


Jane M. Gaines, "The Melos in Marxist Theory," in The Hidden Foundation: Cinema andthe Question of Class, David E. James and Rick Berg, eds. (Minneapolis: University ofMin nesota Press, 1996), 56-71.Karl Marx, "Theses'on Feuerbach," in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The GermanIdeology, Parti, CoJ. Arthur, ed. (NewYork: International Publishers, 1970), 121.Ernst Bloch,.The Principle of Hope, Vol. 1, Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight,trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995),262.Here the reference is to etymology. The L ~ t i n root of sensate is sentire, to feel orto perceive; the Latin root of pathos is pathein, to suffer.It becomes possible to makethis argument if on e follows Bloch, who interprets Marx aslocating productive activity and working conditions in the material base: "Working man,this subject-object relation living in all 'circumstances: belongs in Marx decisively withthe material base; even the subject in the world is world" (262).Ibid., 145.Ibid., 95.SeeJane M. Gaines, "Dream/Factory:' in Rethinking Film Studies, Christine Gledhill andLindaWilliams, eds. (London: Arnold, 2000), 100-113, for a discussion of the uses ofErnst Bloch in film studies and cultural studies.Bloch,46.This span might be understood as a wOrking periodization, operative for the important1994 Amsterdam Workshop. See Nonfict ion from the Teens, Daan Hertogs and Nico deKlerk, eds. (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1994). The question of thecontinu ity of the tradition remains an open one that might consider whether or how toinclude the actualite in a wider documentary tradition. This projectwould go beyondJohn Grierson's original conception of documentary wh ich was defined against newsreels but which found a forefather in Workers Leaving the Factory (France, 1895,Auguste and Louis Lumiere). John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, Forsyth Hardy, ed.(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 199. For an importantre-examination of these issues see Charles Wolfe, "The Poetics and Politics of Nonfiction:Documentary Film:' in Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modem Business Enterprise,1930-39, Tino Balio, ed. (NewYork: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993), 351-386.See note 11. More work needs to be done to consider the u.s. radical filmmaking tradition before Nykino, Frontier Films, and the Film and Photo League, which date from the1930s, looking, for instance, at Paul Strand's Manhatta (USA, 1920). Astep in this direction is Bill Nichols, "Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde," CriticalInqu iry27 (Summer 2001): 580-610. The two comprehensive studies ofthe U.s. radical filmmakingtradition are Russell Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back:RadicalFilmmaking in theU.S., 1930- 42 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982) and William Alexander, Filmon the Left:American DocumentaryFi lm from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1981).The source ofthis critique has been Eisenstein's 1944 objection to Griffith's melodramatization of the contradiction between Labor and Capital. See S.E. Eisenstein, "Dickens,Griffith, and the Film Today:' in Film Form, Jay Leyda, trans. (New York: Harcourt Brace,1977). In his discussion of other examples such as Griffith's The Song of the Shirt (USA,1908), Gold is Not All (USA, 1910) and The Usurer (USA, 1910), Tom Gunning repeatsEisenstein's critique. See his D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film:The Early Years atBiograph (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 134.Eventually we should also consider the politics of other narrativefilms made during thisperiod of labor discontent, for instance The Strike (USA, 1912, Solax) and Mary Pickford'slittle-known film inspired by the Triangle Fire, The Eternal Grind (USA, 1916, MauriceTourneur). (Thanks to Crystal Schmidt for this reference).Th e argument can also be made tha t a very Victorian structure of oppositions organizesMarx's Capital. See Gaines, "The Melos in Marxist Theory:'

23.

24.

22.

20.21.

17.18.19.

12.

f 13.14.15.16.

..LM

Ibid., 85.Brian Winston, Claimingthe Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: British FilmInstitute, 1995), 246, says of the British documentary tradition associated with JohnGrierson, precursor of the American PublicBroa4casting Service special, "TheGriersonians were in the business of having audiences equate images with reality andconverting desperate real-life situations into promises of a better tomorrow:' Withoutchallenging th e validity of this criticism, we can hypothesize the capacity of the documentary audience, beginning in the 1930s, to make this utopian leap.In the Anglo-American academy this critique is often traced to the publication of thetranslation of Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, C i n e m a / l d ~ o l o g y / C r i t i c i s m , Screen12.1 (1971). Originally appearing as an editorial in Cahiers du cinema, 216(October/November 1969), the editorial marked a new political direction for the journal.See "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism," in Movies and Methods I, Bill Nichols, ed.'(Berkeleyand Los Angeles: University of Califomia Press, 1976): "Clearly, the cinema 'reproduces'reality..." accordingto the ideologyof realism, they say. But "'reality' is nothing butanexpression of the prevailing ideology" (25). Two examples of the contemporary critiqueof th e critique of realism are Rites of Realism, Ivone Margulies, ed. (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2002) and Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary:A Criticalintroduction(London and NewYork Routledge, 2000), especially, 3, where the authorsays, "Sometimesit seems necessary to remind writers on documentary that reality does existand that it canbe represented withoutsuch a representation either invalidatingor having. t o b e synonymouswith the reality that preceded it:'Derrida, 184 n. 9.The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was, in its immediate aftermath and has cont inued to be, apoint of referencefor the labor struggle. TheWomen's Trade Union League analyzed theincome arrangements of sixty-five of the victims and found that, in the case of thirty-four,the YQung female worker either contributed nearly all or all of her paycheck to her fa mi-Iy; twenty-one sent support to Eu ropean dependents; and twenty-one either lived aloneor were one of two sisters wh o lived together. See Sarah Eisenstein, Give Us Bread butGive Us Roses: Working Women'sConsciousness in the UnitedStates, 1890 to the FirstWorld War (London and Boston: Routledge, 1983), 15.The definitive work on the firehas long been Leon Stein, The Triangle Shirt Fire (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1962).Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card:Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tomto 0.1. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001),24, where melodramais defined in terms of pathos and action:'Th is is one in a series of recently discovered magic lantern slides depicting mourningimmigrantfamilies exiting the morgue, city officials questioning survivors, and the largeghetto funeral organized by the I.L.G.W.U. and the W.T.U.L. on April 5, 1911. The imagesare partof an archive housed at Cornell University, Kheel Center for Labor-ManagementDocumentation and Archives, a project in cooperation with the Union of Needletrades,Industrial and Textile Employees, begun in 1998. A recent acquisition, the Triangle Fireseries photographs are believed to have been used in a magic lantern format:http://www.ilr.comell.edu/trianglefire. The tradition of organizing images of the urbanpoor into an illustrated lecturewas pioneered by Danishimmigrant and police reporterJacob A. Riis. Perhaps the January 25, 1888, magic lantern showingof his images that hetitled "The Other Half: How it Lives and Dies in New York," long important in theAmerican studies tradition of photorealism, should be re-examined in the light of thenew documentary studies. See the most recent publication of the 1890 text, Jacob A.Riis, How the Other Half Lives: StudiesAmong the Tenements of New York (Boston a.ndNew York: SI.Martin's. Press, 1996),4-5. Alan Trachtenberg,Reading A merican .Photographs (New York: Hill and Wang. 1989), discusses Riis's lantern slide images as"sensational disclosures of hidden socialfacts" (170-71). Riis was no longer working inphotography after 1900. The Triangle Fire photographs would be coincident with thecareer of social reformer Lewis Hine, which began with his trip to Ellis Island in 1904and continued into the 1930s. SeeTrachtenberg, Ch. 4, for an overview.

20 JANE M. GAINES

11.

8.9.

7.

5.6.


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DOCUMfNTARY RADICALITY 13

36. i t i s now widely understood in the field that adualites oiJtnumbered story films until atIeast 1903 and possiblylater. One of the best publications to deal with th is phenomenon is Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, Daan Hertogs and Nico DeKlerk, eds. (Amsterdam:.strichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997).H.arun Farocki, "Workers leaving the Factory," in Harun Farocki: Working on the SightLmes, Thomas Elsaesser, ed. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 238.Further, 240, he says thatthis "rhetorical figure" maybe found at the beginnings andends of films, almost hke a "slogan:' But no communication within the factory, whether"words, glances, or gestures"was recorded bythe motion picture camera. The traditionof "factory gate" footage has become important with the recoveryof the Mitchell andKenyon adualite footage of industrial England. See The Lost World ofMitchell andKenyon, Vanessa Toulmin, Patrick Russell, and Simon Popple, eds. (london: British FilmInstitute, 2004).See note 11.Jean-Luc Lioult, "Framing the Unexpected," Jump Cut47 (Winter 2005):www.ejumpcut.org 40. Althusser, For Marx, 204'-See Colin MacCabe, "Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses,"Screen 15.2 (1974),2-27, for the fullest statement of the influential position that placedthe burden of "showing up" conditions on political cinema.For one of the boldest statements of the prohibition against documentary realism, seeClaire Johnston, "Women's Cinema as Counter Cinema," in Claire Johnston, Notes onWomen'sCinema (london: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973),28: "Thetools and techniques of cinema themselves, as part of reality,are an expression oftheprevailing ideology: they a re not neutral, as rna ny 'revolutionary' film-makers appear tobelieve. It is idealist mystification to believe that 'truth' can be captured bythe camera orthat the conditions ofa film's production (e.g.,a film made collectively bywomen can ofitself reflect the conditions of its production." The important refutation of this position isAlexandra Juhasz, "They SaidWe Were Trying to Show Reality-All Iwant to Show Is MyVideo: The Politics of the Realist Feminist Documentary," in Collecting Visible Evidence,190-215.

43. See the u.s. Library of Congress American Memorywebsite for streamed video from theWestinghouseWorks Collection: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/papr/west/westhome.html .

44. Johnston, 28.45. Pierre Macherey, "Problems of Reflection," Frances Barker, et ai, eds., Proceedings of the

Conference on Literature, Society, and the Sociology of Literature (Essex: University ofEssex, 1976), 42.46. Pierre Macherey, Theory of LiteraryProdudion (london: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1978), 45.47. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in louis Althusser, Lenin

and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York and london: Monthly Review Press, 1971),127-186.48. See Elizabeth Cowie, "DocumentingFictions,"Continuum: The AustralianJournal of

Media and Culture 11.1 (1997),62, where she says that "the assumption that things arecaused, as opposed to being arbitrary and uncaused, is an aspect ofthe discu rsive orderof a culture:'49. Bill Nichols,Representing Reality:Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington:indiana University Press, 1991).50. Althusser, ForMarx, 113.51. Edgar Morin, Cinema, or the ImaginaryMan, (1956; repro Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2005), 75.52. John MacKay, Dziga Vertov: Life and Work (Bloomington: indiana University Press, forthcoming) understands Vertov as providing us with a "utopian vision of sensory collectivity:'

37.

I[ 38.39.41.

42.

11 JANE M. GAINES

25. Charles Sanders Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, Justus Buchler, ed. (New York:Dover Publications, 1955), 119.26. ibid., 114.27. Jane M. Gaines, "Political Mimesis," in Colleding Visible Evidence, Jane M. Gaines andMichael Renov, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).28. The his toryo f how deconstruction made its way from French into Anglo-American filmtheory has not been given the attention it needs. David Rodowick, The Crisis of Political

Modernism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), traces itt h r o u g ~ Philippe Sollers' writing in Tel Quel, and particu larly "Un pas sur la lune," TelQue/39 '(automne 1969): 3-12. Rodowick, 22-23, argues that it i s here that Sollersrecruits deconstruction for a political avant-garde and posits the !"realism/modernism,ideological/theoretical practice, and idealism/materialism" divides that have organizedthe field for over thirtyyea rs. Crucial attempts to formulatea Derridian project, especialIyfor a critical avant-garde, can be seen in a key issue ofAfterimage 5 (1974). See in thisissue Jean-Louis Baud ry, "Ecriture/fiction/ideologie," from Philippe Sollers, Theoried'ensemble (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968), 127-47, and 'Writing, Fiction, Ideology," DianaMatias, trans.; Noel Burch and Jorge Dana, "Propositions," Diana Matias and ChristopherKing, trans., 84-102.

29. louis Althusser, ForMarx, Ben Brewster, trans. (1965; repro london: Verso, 2005), 187:"The critique which, in the last instance, counterposes the abstraction it attributes to theory and to science and the concrete it regards as the real itself, remains an ideologicalcritique, since it denies the reality of scientific practice...:' Peter Dews, "Althusser,Structuralism and the French Epistemological Tradition,"Althusser: A Critical Reader,Gregory Elliott, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 136, says that for Althusser this appeal to"real history"and "real active men" against consciousness is itself ideological, aFeuerbachian residue in works of the epistemological break. But note how much morequickly the field was to challenge Althusserian subject positioning, perhaps as early asthe feminist work on gendered subjects, as in Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole:Feminism and Women's Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

;30. Marx and Engels, 42.31. The most influential recentwork is Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema,

.Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).32. See, for instance, Thomas Elsaesser, "Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time," in Cinema

Futures: Cain, Abel, or Cable?: The Screen Arts in the DigitalAge, Kay Hoffman andThomas Elsaesser, eds. (Amsterdam: Universityof Amsterdam Press, 1998), 201-220.

33. Derrida,85.34. But important academicattempts have been made to disentangle Marxism from the endof communism.See, for instance, in the U.S., Immanuel Wallerstein,After Liberalism(New York: The New Press, 1995); WhitherMarxism? Global Crises in International

Perspedive, Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, eds. (New York: Routledge, 195);and Marxism BeyondMarxism, Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl, eds.(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).See in the latter, in particular, FredricJameson, "Actually Existing Marxism," who in answer to the question "Whatis Marxism?"defines it as a "problematic"with the "capacity to generate new problems," most significantly as it encounters late capitalism (19). My reference here is thus notto any certaindevelopment butonly an observation about a hiatus and that only relative to the 1970s,when Anglo-American academic Marxism contributed to the invention offilm theory andinspired some influential film practice.

35. SeeThomasWaugh, "Why Documentary Filmmakers Keep Trying to Change the World, orWhy People Changing the World Keep Making Documentaries," in "Show Us Life":Toward a History andAesthetics of CommittedDocumentary, Thomas Waugh, ed.(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), xi-xvii.


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53. Jean-Louis Comolli, "Documentary Journey to the Land of the Head Shrinkers," October90 (1999): 38. In another reversal of the premises of the 1970s, Harun Farocki finds, nolonger heretically, that his filmmaking practice starts with the world-historical. Thus, forradical filmmaking, the world is source: "Its signs and meanings are notput into theworld, they arise from the real. In the cinema i t i s as if the world itselfwanted to tell ussomething" (Farocki, 243).

54. See J ane M. Gaines, "Radical Attractions," Wide Angle 21.2 (2002): 100-121 for a discussion of George Stoneyand Judith Helfand's Uprising of '34 (USA, -1994), a documentaryfilm about a 1930s textile strike in the American South that has worked effectively as acontemporary organizing film, in part because of its rhythmic aesthetic.

JANE M. GAINES is Professor of Literature and English at Duke University whereshe founded the Program in Film/Video/Digital. She is the author of ContestedCulture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (1991), Fire and Desire: Mixed RaceMovies in the Silent Era (2001), and several edited and co-edited cpllections ondocumentary and cultural theory. Currently she is working on FictioningHistories: Women Film Pioneers. "Documenting Reality" is partof a project called"The Documentary Destiny of Cinema."

24 lANE M. GAINES

PHILIP ROSEN

NOW AND THEN: Conceptual Problemsin Historicizing Documentary Imaging

. Resume: La periode de 1918 a 1930 fut temoin de I'emergence du documentairecomme pratiqueformelJement et semantiquement differente d'autresformes nonfictives ., A la meme epoque apparaissait aussi un cinema "experimental" sciemment affilie aux soi-disant avant-gardes historiques. Puisque Ie terme persistetoujours a notre ere de postmodernisme digital, nous sommes en droit d'examinerles implications de cette persistance en rapport a I'image documentaire. Par exemple,faudrait-if developper une approche multi-temporelle des histoires et pratiques ducinema du documentaire? Un bon point de depart pour explorer ces implicationsest I'oeuvre de Dziga Vertov, qui met en question J'opposition entre Ie documentaireet Ie cinema experimental et qu'on peut considerer par I'intermediaire de la theoriedes medias digitaux de Lev Manovich et du concept de I'histoire sublime de .Frank Ankersit.

The years 1918-30 sawthe rise and solidification of broad cultural-textual regimesof screen production still invoked in media discourses and media pedagogy.One was documentary, which was conceptualized and named in the 1920s. Thisterm was coined to denote a regime of film practices formally and semanticallydistinct from earlier, widespread "non-fiction" forms that also traded on theindexicality of the film image, especially actualities. These now became regardedby most cognoscenti not just as outmoded but as cinematic dead ends, exceptwhen they could be read as looking forward to later cinemas.Mainstream cinema had recently solidified as a global industry dominatedbyHollywood. Such different figures as Terry Ramsaye and John Grierson abettedits hegemony when they implicitly (Ramsaye) or explicitly (Grierson) expelledthe first two decades of commercial cinema from the ranks of artistic or signifi- .cant filmmaking. The notion that filmmaking prior to this development was a"primitive" cinema grounded some of the first great metanarratives of film historiography, as in the influential 1926 book by RamsayeYBut at virtually thesame time that Ramsaye gloried in anecdotes of individuals whose achievementssupposedly led to the emergence of Hollywood, the "story film," and cinematicart, Grierson invented the term documentary.

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