the chutry experiment: September 2004 Archives

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September 29, 2004

Product Placement in the Movies

Matt Dentler has a link to a new website, Brandcameo, asite dedicated to tracking "product placement" in Hollywood films. It's an interesting site, and not all brand placements are positive, as the website's entry on F9/11 suggests. More later, perhaps, when I have a little more time.

Posted by chuck at 4:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 28, 2004

Teaching the Election

Many of my regular readers may know that I'm teaching my freshman composition class using an election theme. The classes seem to be going well--lots of great conversations, and many of the students in my classes are asking good questions, raising valuable concerns, and doing lots of independent reading on the election.

All that being said, this should be an exciting week for my students. On Wednesday night, my students will attend a talk by Vince Keenan, the founder of Publius.org, about electronic democracy (Chris linked to the announcement and map several weeks ago). Should be a rewarding lecture, and it's open to the public, so I encourage all Atlanta bloggers to show up.

Thursday, my colleague and I will combine our classes for a discussion of youth voting led by Vince. My students and I have already begun talking about various debates about voting, so combining the classes should make for an interesting discussion. Then on Thursday evening, our classes will be watching the debates together, followed by a discussion before student (and teacher) perceptions are affected by the post-debate spinners. All of these activities should be very cool. I'm looking forward to hearing Vince, and I think it will be interesting to watch the debates with such a large group of people.

Then, I'm going to take a deep breath and start doing some heavy-duty writing.

Posted by chuck at 10:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

September 27, 2004

Blogging and Journalism

Andrew Cline and Jay Manifold have recently announced a cool new concept (and I'd say that, even if I wasn't participating), 411blog.net, a blog designed to cultivate the relationship between the blogosphere and more traditional media. Cline and Manifold write:

Reporters can use it to quickly authenticate highly technical or specialized story elements with subject-matter experts (SMEs) drawn from the best the blogosphere has to offer, including academics, business people, scientists, and lay experts of all kinds.

Bloggers can use 411blog.net to nominate subject-matter experts, build trust with traditional media, and increase their standing in the blogosphere.

I'm excited about this project in part because I think it's a great way to increase conversation, not only between bloggers and traditional media, but also between academics and non-academics, a topic George has been discussing for some time now. I encourage everyone to check out Andrew and Jay's announcement and to consider nominating some of your fellow bloggers for this cool new project.

Posted by chuck at 9:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bus 174

Bus 174 (IMDB) is a powerful documentary which depicts a hostage crisis in Rio de Janeiro when 21-year old street person, Sandro do Nascimento, holds several bus passengers hostage for several hours after a botched robbery attempt. The underequipped and untrained police force were unable to secure the area around the bus, and the media quickly picked up the story, broadcasting the story live for several hours on Brazilian TV. Director José Padilha uses the raw footage of the event, creating a sense of liveness and intensity unparalleled in recent film.

Because he generally avoids using the media coverage itself, he avoids turning his documentary into yet another film about media spectacle, instead choosing to focus on the class and race antagonisms that played out during this frightening afternoon. Mixing raw footage with talking heads interviews with police officers, hostages, social workers, and sociologists, as well as Sandro's family and friends , Padilha produces a haunting account of life in Brazil for an "invisible" person like Sandro. Early in the film, we learn that Sandro watched as his mother, who ran a small business, was mugged and killed when he was six years old. Because he never knew his father, Sandro turns to the streets, living among the street gangs that roam the city, robbing people for food, clothes, and in Sandro's case, drugs.

We later learn that, as a teenager, Sandro survived a notorious police massacre of several street kids, and Sandro's case worker and his aunt explain that Sandro spent some time in prison for his crimes. Late in the film, the conditions in Brazil's prisons are brought vividly to life in a short sequence in which Padiho goes into a prison. People are stacked on top of each other in crowded cells, with forty people in a space meant for ten or so. The prisoners scream about abusive guards. Others tell us that their food is rotten, that they cannot get medical help, or that they cannot contact legal counsel. This entire sequence, filmed in the negative mode that switches black with white, making the jail seem utterly horrific. As Roger Ebert describes it:

nothing in the work of Bosch or the most abysmal horror films prepares us for these images.

The film builds to a bleak and horrifying conclusion, one that is clearly anticiapted by the interviews, but one that still left me feeling completely hollow. I don't think I've been this deeply unsettled by a film in a long time. Most reviewers have compared Bus 174 to City of God, but while City portrays a similar milieu, this documentary, with its raw footage, often unfolding in real time, had a far more powerful effect on me.

As J. Hoberman notes, Bus 174 does have an important subtext in Sandro's awareness of the emdia coverage. His constant insistence that what we're seeing is "not a movie," that it's not a Hollywood action film, seems crucial. Sandro seems aware of his media image, even to the point of asking his hostages to participate in the performance. I'm not quite sure yet how to reconcile Sandros' performance with the film's clear attempts to address Rio's problems with unemployment and poverty, but it's an important element of the film. Bus 174, with its troubling images of poverty and violence, is going to stick with me for a long time.

Posted by chuck at 12:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 26, 2004

Tarnation Revisited

Just a qick link to this New York Times article on Jonathan Caouette, whose documentary, Tarnation, was a popular success at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals. I discussed this film several months ago after it was mentioned in cinema minima, and now that I'm working on my Capturing the Friedmans paper, I'm really intrigued by this concept. Caoette's self-documentary uses video footage (he recorded over 160 hours) to tell the story of his difficult youth.

Like David Friedman who videotaped his family's arguments to gain an emotional distance from what was happening, Caouette comments in an interview: "I used the camera as a way to disassociate myself from what I was being subjected to," adding that "I began turning the camera on my family as a way of dealing with it." Caoette also notes that he carefully labelled the tapes he made, believing they would be valuable at some point.

I also found Caoette's discussion of the editing process interesting. In the Times article, he explains that several "subplots" of his life story were removed, including the information that he has a 9-year old son. He also notes his initial discomfort with releasing his film to a wider audience, fearing that he might be exploiting his family's story.

Posted by chuck at 10:34 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

September 25, 2004

Fog City at the Eyedrum

Just a reminder to try to catch Fog City on Wednesday September 29, at 8 PM at The Eyedrum. I probably won't be able to make it because of a prior commitment , but it sounds like a really cool idea:

In an era of globalization, our mental maps of cities have become dynamic montages emanating from literature, film, advertisements, news programs, television and personal anecdotes. Consequently, the image of the city is never homogenous, segregated or totalizing. In this milieu, the idea of place is a constantly unfolding event scene that simultaneously connects many spaces and levels of abstractions.

Music By: Robert Cheatham & Friends, others
Featured Text: Samuel Beckett, "Text for Nothing #8," 1958. Spoken by Jack MacGowan.

Posted by chuck at 7:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blogging as Temporal Montage

This is just a quick entry to make a quick connection between Kylie Jarrett's interesting discussion of blogs as a form of "temporal montage" and my own, somewhat disorganized, thoughts on that subject. Jarrett describes a link to an earlier entry as a type of "flashback," which seems like a promising way of thinking about the temporality of blogging. Speaking of flashbacks, this is the entry that marks the beginning of a conversation with Weez, so it's nice to revisit that part of my past.

These issues aren't really relevant to the paper I'm working on right now, but I'd like to return to these ideas at some point when I'm less swamped.

Posted by chuck at 6:06 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Writing for the Public: Students and Blogging

Very slow start today after a late night of fending off computer viruses and a long afternoon of following Purdue's too-close-for-comfort victory over Illinois, but I've been working on my blogging paper (more info on the conference) for most of the afternoon and wanted to collect a few of my thoughts. I've been reading through some of the essays from the terrific Into the Blogosphere collection, and many of the essays seem to have something relevant to my blogging paper.

In "Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom," Charles Lowe and Terra Williams emphasize the value of weblogs in teaching students to write for the public, arguing that students will become more effective writers if they are writing for public audiences on the Internet. In this context, they quote Catherine Smith, who argues that students "take real-world writing more seriously when it is done on the web, where it might actually be seen and used" (2000, p. 241).* I tend to agree that public writing requires a greater sense of responsibility and that students, once they have completed the blogging "learning curve," usually take this kind of public writing more seriously than the journals that were submitted directly to me.

They add that public writing also "deemphasizes teacher authority" (Bruffee), again requiring students to take more responsibility for their writing. Again, I think I've had a fairly similar experience, although I would add that my experience with teaching blogging last fall seemed to have the effect of creating a shared identity for the entire class, especially after other bloggers began commenting on the class in their weblogs or via email. As my initial comments suggest, I was not expecting that kind of attention in the blogosphere, but the other bloggers' comments about my class assignment ultimately cemented lessons about audience that few textbooks could reproduce.

Lowe and Williams also compare the use of weblogs to the newly popular group hypertext project at the end of the semester, noting many of the reservations I've had about teaching these kinds of projects. Like them, I've had great success with group-authored weblogs at the end of the semester, especially if students have been writing in their personal blogs all semester. Group "hypertext projects" also tend to "require specialized software," such as Dreamweaver, thus requiring students to work on a central computer. As they note, students also have to learn how to use these tools, while most blogging software is fairly easy to use. Often one student will become the default tech support person for that group, taking on a disproportionate amount of work. In addition, Lowe and Williams note that these projects also encourage the overuse of "eye-candy," such as Macromedia Flash, instead of concentrating on writing. I do have some mixed feelings here in that Lowe and Williams seem to privilege the word ("content") over the image ("eye candy"), but their basic argument is one that guides my own decision to use gorup-authored weblogs instead of the hypertext project.

The major objection I've encountered to this use of public writing is that it opens up the student to the "unknown outside," an openness that may be somewhat intimidating. As Nick carbone notes in the comments to their essay, writing for the public "needs to be a student's choice." Nick adds later that he wants students to feel "free to say dumb and embarrassing things" without worrying about those things appearing on the web. It's a legitimate concern, and I've addressed it in part by allowing students to publish under a pseudonym known to the rest of the class. I'd also note that I've tried to structure my blogging assignments so that students don't feel required to complete any single assignment that makes them feel uncomfortable. In my current election course, Rhetoric and Democracy, I've given my students free reign to blog about any article they wish as long as it pertains to the election. That may not completely liberate students from their discomfort in writing for the public, but it does allow students to avoid the discomfort of writing about their personal lives on the web (note: Terra Williams, in her comments, mentions taking a similar approach).

I hadn't planned to write so much about this topic here. It's one of the major arguments of my paper, though, and Lowe and Williams provide a nice framework for asking many of the right questions. By the way, if you've read this far, I'd appreciate it if you dropped by and read some of my students' blog entries (linked in the sidebar of my course blog), just so they know there's an audience out there taking their writing seriously.

* Smith, Catherine. (2000). Nobody, which means anybody: Audience on the world wide web. In Sibylle Gruber (Ed.), Weaving a virtual web: Practical approaches to new information technologies (pp. 239-249). Urbana: NCTE.

Posted by chuck at 4:32 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

September 24, 2004

The Democratization of Celebrity

This afternoon I had one of those happy accidents when my research on one project triangulated with research on another, seemingly unrelated project. While doing some last-minute research for my conference paper on weblogs in the composition classroom, I came across Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd's article, "Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog," from the Into the Blogosphere collection, in which they discuss the genre of blogging in terms of the blurring of the boundary between public and private.

In the article, Miller and Shepherd describe Bill Clinton's presidency in terms of Clinton's removal of "barriers between himself and the voting public," as illustrated by his appearance on MTV where he answered the "boxers or briefs" question, but also by the exposure of his private life to the public eye through the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. At the same time, Miller and Shepherd point to other examples of the weakening of the boundary between public and private such as webcams and reality TV, a trend they describe as "the democratization of celebrity." Miller and Shepherd proceed to discuss this "democratization" in terms of what Clay Calvert refers to as "mediated voyeurism" (I actually find this concept problematic in that I'm not sure if voyeurism can be "unmedaited"), arguing that "although often associated with sexual gratification, voyeurism more generally strikes us as an unseemly interest in others as curiosities, not as moral equals." Miller and Shepherd then discuss how this phenomenon of "mediated voyeurism" plays out in weblogs, many of which offer fairly explicit accounts of people's private lives for public consumption. In this context, I'd guess that the Washingtonienne story broke after they published the article, but it's perhaps the best illustration possible of this dynamic at work, especially when we take into account the rather stark denunciations of Cutler's actions (or, more precisely, the amount of attention Jessica Cutler has received for her actions).

At the same time, they make a connection between voyeurism and our desire for truth or authenticity. Blogs became so poular so quickly in part because of a general skepticism, from both the right and the left, towards mainstream media, and many bloggers seem to offer an authenticity missing from commercial media. The best example here would probably be the popularity of Salam Pax, Riverbend, and other Iraqi bloggers who offer (or offered) a much more personal, and therefore more compelling, narrative of the war in Iraq. Of course, it's important to note that their stories provide only the illusion of immediacy and are clearly mediated by the weblog genre.

I introduce their argument at length (and to be honest I haven't yet finished reading their essay) because it brings into focus one of the central questions I want to address in my essay on Andrew Jarecki's documentary film, Capturing the Friedmans. I think it's pretty clear that Jarecki's film participates in this "mediated voyeurism," presenting the Friedmans as objects of curiosity, whether or not he tried to avoid this representation of the Friedman family. This "mediated voyeurism" is most obviously visible in the scenes that use home movies captured by the Friedman family, especially in the scenes in which David Friedman videotapes his family as they devolve into bitter arguments and divisions between family members.

One of Miller and Shepherd's most important points, in this context, is their observation that this voyeurism isn't really possible without willing objects, thus offering "media exhibitionism" as a complementary concept. Here they discuss the motivations for this exhibitionism, and in terms of Capturing the Friedmans, there's certainly a lot to discuss here, especially given the degree to which most members of the Friedman family are conscious of themselves as performers, not only in terms of their carefully scripted family videos but also in terms of David's career choice as a party clown. Of course, the Friedman family is also motivated by their desire to help Jesse in the fight to clear his name (at several points, even as a young adult, he discusses the possibility of going public with the case and trying it in the media).

For now, I'm hoping that I'll be able to use this entry as a launching point for thining about the conference paper, but it also seems relevant that my research on blogs and my research on documentary film seem to be meeting at this intersection between the public and the private, as well as the intersection between truth and fiction. Meeting my parents for dinner in a few minutes, so I don't have much more time to work on this entry, but again, I'm hoping to use this entry to frame some of the questions that I'll be asking, especially in my Capturing the Friedmans paper.

Posted by chuck at 5:04 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

September 22, 2004

News on the March

Check it out: I'm quoted in an article on academic blogging in The Guardian. So are several other cool people whose blogs I've been reading for a long time. Here's the section of the article where I'm quoted (but you should go read the whole article):

In the same vein, Charles Tryon (http://chutry.wordherders.net) gets students to blog for a first year composition course he teaches at the school of literature, communication and culture at Georgia Tech in America. Last year, they kept personal blogs. This year, they are working on group blogs while Tryon coordinates the class via a blog (http://democracymatters.blogspot.com), which points students to relevant material online. He suggests that blogging - reading and writing posts, following links and discussions - encourages students to think critically about technology and how it affects the way we write and think.

Tryon adds that "blogs are no substitute for class discussion". Some suggest that eventually, blogs will become just one part of the general digital tool kit available to teachers. Others suspect they may have more lasting effects on academia.

Not sure I have much to say about the actual content of the article right now. I think Jim McClellan has done a good job of describing the ways in which blogs have been used by academics. I'll add that, like Jill, I've tried to use blogs to bring students into a "larger debate that extends far beyond the classroom." My current composition classes have been focused on writing and reading about the upcoming election, and I'm hoping that blogs can be a useful way of helping students to engage with that debate.

Posted by chuck at 7:37 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

September 21, 2004

Michael Mann on Los Angeles

Grading marathon is done, so tonight I've been trying to relax a bit. A few weeks ago, I made the observation that Collateral seemed to be very much about the city of Los Angeles, and in a recent interview, director Michael Mann talks about how LA functions in Collateral and his earlier film, Heat:

Los Angeles is relatively undiscovered as a location for pictures. It has its own pattern of culture which is almost like travelling on the internet - when you visit websites you journey through some kind of interstitial space and the domains are not contiguous. I think LA is the most exciting contemporary city in the United States, but you have to know where to go. And a lot of Angelinos don't.

Not much to add here, but I find the discussion of "interstitial space" interesting here. I think his film really capures that, with the scenes at the blues club and the Korean night club especially. Also cool: Mann's discussion about his choice to use DV for nearly 80% of the film, particularly his characterization of DV as a more "painterly medium" than film. Thanks to GreenCine for the link.

Posted by chuck at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 19, 2004

Sunday Morning Coming Down

I've got to start grading, so I don't have time for a full post, but I'm looking forward to reading Michael Bérubé's discussion of Tom Frank's latest book What's the Matter with Kansas?. I remember reading the Salon interview with Frank a few months ago that Michael mentions in his blog entry:

You have a whole critique of pop culture that is difficult to summarize, but let’s talk more about your sympathy with the right-wing activists. When they bemoan how coarse and cheap pop culture has become, you almost seem to agree, or at least to feel that they have a certain kind of point.

Well, look. I should say this: I started out as a punk rocker, and we try to deal with cultural dissent, genuinely shocking things, at the Baffler. But as I have written about many, many times, so much of the shockery that surrounds us is not genuine. There’s no avant-garde about it. It’s not the real thing, it’s a watered-down capitalist projection. You’ve seen this argument before, “the commodification of dissent.”

The argument I’m making is not that they’re absolutely right to be disgusted by our culture—although when I’m away from the country and I come back and turn on MTV, I’m always like, “Holy shit!” I’m just trying to play up the flagrant contradiction. If you hate this stuff, talk about capitalism! Talk about the forces that do it! I’m focusing on the contradiction there, rather than accepting their argument about obscenity or whatever.

Right, so your real problem is with the kind of cultural-studies intellectual who believes that pop culture really is subversive.

Yes, exactly. The cultural studies people read these products of capitalism as face value. They see fake rebellion as the real thing. To put it in very vulgar terms, that’s the argument.

Madonna kissing Britney is somehow actually socially meaningful.

Right, exactly. And the heartland people often see it that way also. I’m saying it’s not that, it is as pure an expression of business rationality as is a McDonald’s hamburger.

While I'd certainly agree that the Madonna-Britney kiss is far from subversive, I'd argue that his characterization of cultural studies here is pretty misrepresentative. I doubt there are many serious cultural studies cholars who will read that event without thinking about the dollar signs that framed it. I'd planned to blog this interview when it first appeared, but never found the time, and right now, I really do need to be working on other things.

Also just wanted to note that the comments in Michael's post led me to UC Irvine film and media professor Catherine Liu's very cool blog, Don't Ask Me!, which I'll read regulalry from now on.

Posted by chuck at 1:19 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Silver City

John Sayles' Silver City (IMDB) has been describd as the latest entry in the Bush-bashing film cycle, and while that sentiment is certainly there, the film operates more effectively as an Altmanesque satire of politics through the detective genre. The film also ends with one of the most interesting final shots I've seen all year (I'm finding it hard to describe without giving anything away, but that shot alone was worth the price of admission for me).

Chris Cooper, playing the Bush-like Dickie Pilager, a canddiate for governor in Colorado, appears more as a cipher, almost devoid of personality. You get the usual jokes ("he's a big picture guy;" "he doesn't read much"), and Dickie Pilager, like George W. Bush, comes from a prominent political family and has ties to mysterious wealthy businessmen (including the CEO of "Bentel," rather than Bechtel). Dickie is shepherded by a controlling campaign chief, Chuck Raven, who might remind you of a certain Bush administration official. But if the film had remained firmly within this level of satire, I'm not sure that I would have enjoyed it, and it would have had little to say about American politics. Instead, Silver City focuses on a murder mystery plot, allowing Sayles to unearth many of the contradictions--race, social class, citizenship, etc--that cannot be reconciled very easily.

During the film's opening sequence, we see Pilager filming a campaign advertisement meant to convey his commitment to the environment. He's supposed to be fishing in a shimmering lake, perfectly framed by the mountains behind him, while wearing the LL Bean clothes that make him look like an everyday guy. While filming the commercial, Dickie's fishing line accidentally hooks a corpse, and the nervous Chuck Raven quickly leaps into action, getting Pilager away from the scene to avoid the appearance of scandal. He then hires Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston in his first leading role), a typically down-on-his-luck detective, to conspicuously follow three people who might try to fabricate a scandal for the candidate just a few weeks before the election.

Danny is a former reporter, someone who was committed to the kind of investigative reporting that now seems lost. He refers back to the Big Story he'd uncovered, but then when the newspaper went public, his anonymous sources backed down or disappeared, the newspaper got sued, and he was fired. There's an interesting sequence early in the film when Danny goes to the darkly-lit office of his former editor, who now runs an underground internet newspaper, with several post-hippie employees working as reporters. This news source contrasts with the commercial newspaper where Nora, Danny's ex, works. Nora struggles to be critical of Pilager's campaign, but because she is dispatched out to watch Pilager repeat the same stump speech over and over again, she has no real opportunity for true reporting. Perhpas making things more troubling, she's engaged to a prominent state lobbyist for a real estate group. While it's not the major concern of the film, these sequences offer an important critique of much of the media coverage of American politics.

Danny visits each of the three people he's supposed to "investigate," first meeting with a conservative shock radio host who thinks that Pilager is too liberal. He then talks to a mining engineer who knows that Silver City, a planned community, is being built on an abandoned mine filed with toxic chemicals. Finally, he talks to Dickie's sister (well played by Daryl Hannah), the family's black sheep daughter who smokes pot and trains for the Olympic archery team. In trying to put all of the pieces together, Danny begins mapping the story out, literally drawing the connections between the major players on his living room wall, allowing Danny to "map" the relationships between the media, politics, law enforcement, water rights, and real estate, creating the image of an informal conspiracy (some of these connections also reminded me of Polanski's Chinatown, another film that uses the detective plot in a similar way). By "informal," I mean that many of these connections are only loosely articulated and that there is no official puppet master pulling the strings.

This is where Silver City reminds me of Altman's "big" films with dozens of characters and multiple subplots, but as with Sayles' City of Hope and Lone Star (two of the most underrated films of the 1990s in my opinion), these connections serve to underscore some of the contradictions of social class, race, and citizenship in the United States. These contradictions become most evident when Danny discovers that the person found in the lake was an illegal immigrant from Mexico, exploited as cheap labor, and that all of the witnesses who could talk about the crime would not be protected if they spoke out against the criminals.

Like many of Sayles' films, especially Lone Star and Limbo, Silver City's ending is one of the film's major strengths. I won't say anything else about it above the fold, but to me it presents one of the major interpretive challenges of the film. Some possible spoilers below the fold.

The film ends, as it begins, with a photo opportunity, Pilager giving a speech on the same bucolic lake where he hooked the corpse at the beginning of the film. In this photo shoot, Pilager is giving a speech in front of some hastily built bleachers with police officers in one section and a high school sports team and cheerleading squad in the other. The shot conveys just how carefully managed these campaign appearances actually are, and then, as the camera glides out over the lake, we see the corpse of a fish slowly rise to the surface of the lake, killed by the toxic chemicals that are seeping into it from the nearby abandoned mine. Gradually, another fish surfaces, and then as the camera tracks back further from the lake, we see dozens of fish floating on the surface. It's an amazingly cynical shot, a satire of the American political system that allows such inequalities to persist. If I had one criticism of the film, however, it might be that the film offers few, if any, alternatives to this cynicism and resignation. Danny and Nora end up together, but their reunion seems almost completely wrapped up in their shared resignation, their exhaustion in combatting the corruption they have witnessed.

Posted by chuck at 11:36 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 18, 2004

Everybody Knows

I'm still in the middle of my grading marathon, so no time for blogging. Late last night, I did come across a cool Guardian article celebrating Leonard Cohen's 70th birthday. Cohen's one of my favorite musicians, and it's good to see him still writing and recording interesting music.

Things may be quiet around here for some time, as I'm going to be very busy over the next few weeks while I catch up on grading, prepare for the job market, and finish up a couple of conference papers.

Posted by chuck at 12:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 15, 2004

The Great Debate

Here's an interesting resource: The Great Debate & Beyond: The History of Presidential Debates and Beyond. The archive includes select video clips froms televised presidential debates since 1960. Coincidentally, I was talking to a colleague about wanting to see (or show my students) the "You're no JFK" moment from the Bentsen-Quayle VP debate during the 1988 election, so this resource could be very helpful. Also several good clips from Reagan's debates ("Are you better off four years ago?").

Thanks to Blog for Democracy for the good find. Cross posted at Palimpsest.

Posted by chuck at 9:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 14, 2004

Movies as Political Puppets

Via Metaphilm: David Sterritt's CSM article, "Movies as Political Puppets." Sterritt lines up all the usual suspects, Team America, Silver City, and F9/11, but he mentions one film that I didn't know, The September Tapes, which "blends nonfiction footage with staged scenes to create a thriller about a journalist who is searching for Osama bin Laden." I like the idea of blending nonfiction and staged footage, and the investigation plot could serve the film well. Sterritt primarily considers whether or not the "political cycle" will affect the upcoming election, a question I've visited on several (too many?) occasions.

What I find interesting about the article (and I'm blogging between classes, so I'll be brief) is the discussion of the role of film or popular entertainment in convincing people to vote for a particular candidate, or to hold a particular set of beliefs. Susan Zeig notes that any impact Moore's film (or other "political" films) might have cannot be measured very easily. Aside from the fact that the effect of a political documentary will depend on an audience member's preconceptions, it seems almost impossible to identify a single event (a film, a talk radio show, a conversation) that would determine one's vote. Also, in a sense, the article doesn't really explain that these decisions aren't always rational, as this now famous New Yorker article points out.

I'm also trying to think through the article's combined focus on documentary/non-fiction and fiction films. I'd assume that audiences go into a documentary film with a much different set of expectations (that there will be an argument, that the director will use factual information) than a feature film. And many of the fiction films may not have an overt goal of defeating Bush this fall. Team America probably doesn't have this goal, while Sayles openly states he'd like Bush to lose.

Perhaps the most interesting point in the article is raised by Robert Merrill, editor of Baltimore's Maisonneuve Press:

The election of Ronald Reagan was the moment when entertainment overwhelmed politics. [...] His media advisers were entertainment and advertising experts.... It's the same for Arnold Schwarzenegger, and George W. Bush clearly sees himself as playing a role in a drama.

I've been talking in passing with my students about the short films played before each candidate accepted his nomination, including Bush's, which placed him in a very clear narrative about confronting the war on terror, culminating somewhat oddly in his throwing out the first pitch of the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium soon after 9/11. I'm not sure how that event resolves the tension raised by the short film (the need for leadership), or more importantly, the problems raised by the September 11 attacks. But, the main point is that these films are usually fairly transparent attempts to organize a narrative around the candidate, and I think that's what makes them interesting as cultural artifacts.

Not sure how to bring these fragments into a narrative myself, but some of these questions have been on my mind lately. I'm in processing mode right now, so many of these ideas may be attached to questions that aren't apparent in this blog entry.

Posted by chuck at 1:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 13, 2004

When Blogging Goes Bad

For now, just a quick pointer to a couple of blog entries I'd want to consider while writing my paper on blogging for an upcoming conference:

Steven D. Krause: When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Emailing Lists, Discussion, and Interaction
Dennis G. Jerz: Jerz's Literacy Weblog

Lots of meetings today, so I'll have to come back to these blog entries later. In a sense, I no longer perceive blogging as an "experiment" in my classes, and that may mean that I need to change my approach to using them in the classroom. I have been thinking about how my use of blogs informs the election-themed composition course I'm currently teaching, and much of that material should find its way into the conference paper.

Posted by chuck at 3:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 12, 2004

McCain on Moore

Just a quick link to the text of John McCain's speech at the RNC on Monday, August 30. I'm writing a short review essay on documentary film and want to mention his cut on Michael Moore:

The years of keeping Saddam in a box were coming to a close. The international consensus that he be kept isolated and unarmed had eroded to the point that many critics of military action had decided the time had come again to do business with Saddam, despite his near daily attacks on our pilots, and his refusal, until his last day in power, to allow the unrestricted inspection of his arsenal.

Our choice wasn't between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not our critics abroad. Not our political opponents.

And certainly not a disingenuous film maker who would have us believe that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls.

Michael Moore was present at the convention, of course, and the story received a lot of attention, specifically because of the "unusual" mix of politics and filmmaking, as John Nichols' piece in The Capital Times illustrates.

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More Underground Cinema

I'm in the midst of a grading marathon and therefore not in the bloggiest of moods today, but Heidi passed along a link to another Guardian article on La Mexicaine de la Perforation, the small group of "urban explorers" who built a small cinema in the Paris catacombs. Not much to say right now, but the group does have very good taste in movies, showing such films as Dark City, Eraserhead, and Brazil in their underground theater.

Like George, I enjoyed the conversations we held yesterday during our September Project event but wish that more people had attended. Thanks again to David Silver and Sarah Washburn for coming up with such a cool idea.

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September 11, 2004

The Hunting of the President

Harry Thomason and Nickolas Perry's The Hunting of the President (IMDB), a documentary about "the ten-year campaign to destroy Bill Clinton," has been lost in the shuffle of the many other fine documentaries that have appeared in theaters this year. In fact, compared to the packed houses in Atlanta for F9/11 and Control Room, I was a little disappointed to see such a small crowd present last night for Thomason and Parry's film. I was even more disappointed because Hunting is an engrossing, entertaining film, equal parts conspiracy thriller and political documentary (and, yes, like J. Hoberman, I'm aware that Clinton's story is yesterday's news).

Very quickly, The Hunting of the President introduces us to shady Arkansas locals, including a private detective and other local characters looking either to shut down Clinton's rise to power or at least make a profit from it. These characters are introduced rapidly, using titles that appear to be typed onto the screen (echoing the effect used in All the President's Men). At the same time, the film uses archival footage from kitschy 1950s detective films to humorous mock the artificial seriousness with which the investigations of Clinton were conducted. This use of footage reminded me more of The Corporation than of Michael Moore's use of similar footage, but the effect of the inserted footage is to tweak the tone of Hunting and prevent it from feeling too heavy-handed.

We watch as reporters discuss overhearing conversations on houseboats involving shadowy figures from the Arkansas Project, while Bill Clinton's ascent to the Presidency begins to appear inevitable, although we rarely glimpse Clinton himself, an aspect of the film that I found lacking (I'm no Clinton apologist, but conveying his charisma, especially during the 1992 campaign would have made the film more interesting, I believe). Further, because Thomason is a famous FOB (Friend of Bill), it seems to gloss Clinton's complicated sexual history.

The film builds chronologically (the official website has a nice timeline and list of key figures), with local Arkansas "scandals," including the Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers stories, giving way to Ken Starr's unabashedly partisan $80 million investigation of Whitewater. These stories move primarily through talking heads inteviews, with David Brock emerging as a credible figure in discussing the smear tactics used by conservative Clinton haters. He also illustrates how the "liberal media" were complicit in bringing down Clinton, with everyone seeking to be the next Woodward and Bernstein in a new Watergate, a process that seems to be playing itself out yet again in the ridiculous Memogate controversy, in which we now see dozens of bloggers suddenly proclaiming themselves document experts. Meanwhile, reporters who questioned the validity of Starr's investigation were immediately tarred as Clinton apologists

Susan McDougall and Claudia Riley emerge as key figures for talking about the Independent Counsel's Whitewater investigation (McDougall eventually was sentenced to two years in prison, basically for refusing to testify against the Clintons). McDougall's tales of being forced to wear the "red dress" in prison, typically a signifier of especially violent crimes such as chld killing, is rather upsetting and, of course, recalls another famous dress. Riley, a longtime Democrat and classic southern matriarch, provides plenty of color, echoing the film's assertions about the Starr crowd's fascination with Bill Clinton's sex life. Asked if she ever had sex with Clinton, the 74-year old replies, "He never asked me."

Some viewers of the film will fault it for not giving voice to "the other side," and Thomason and Perry show only a couple of interviews with people who fought for Clinton's impeachment (although the closing credits list several of the people who refused to be interviewed), but like David Edelstein, I don't think this is a major fault in the film. It still makes the clear case that American taxpayers spent $80 million on an investigation that "turned up nothing but evidence of consensual oral sex." And, to be honest, the film does downplay the Monica Lewinsky affair (I don't think Linda Tripp was mentioned at all in the film), but their absence from the film doesn't diminish its main point.

As Edelstein points out, Hunting effectively conveys the ability of the right in "transforming baseless innuendo into the stuff of $80-million taxpayer-funded investigations—and impeachments." But, unlike Bush's Brain, which seemed focused only on identifying Karl Rove as a masterful manipulator, Hunting doesn't pretend to identify an organized conspiarcy. Intsead, several figures, from Ken Starr to Jerry Falwell to billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, emerge as working against the President for a variety of reasons. The film's ability to avoid the image of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" is one of its greatest strengths. Intsead, it focuses on this loose alliance of figures who fought to weaken one of the most popular presidents in recent memory.

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September 8, 2004

Quick Question

Are other Moveable Type users having trouble using the MT Blacklist? I keep getting an error message that says something like "the server has left."

Posted by chuck at 11:19 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Underground Cinema

Fascinating story about a secret cinema in the catacombs of Paris. I'm sick today (some kind of cold or flu--ick!), so hopefully I'll be able to come back to this story later when I'm feeling better. Very interesting that most of the movies the police discovered were 1950s film noir classics and recent thrillers. The theater was equipped with a bar and a small kitchen. Also cool: when teh police returned several days later to find the theater's electrical source, someone had left a note saying, "Do not try to find us."

Thanks to George and Heidi for the tip.

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September Project Atlanta

Just got some great news: Paul Loeb has agreed to participate in the September Project event here in Atlanta this weekend. Loeb is the author of several books, including Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time and The Impossible Will Take a While. Loeb will be joined by Sarah Shalf, a civil liberties lawyer who represented Martha Burk in her quest to be admitted to Augusta National Golf Club. David has more information about Sarah Shalf, who will be discussing some recent cases involving the prosecution of terrorsit suspects, Hamdi, Padilla, and Rasul.

Our September Project event will be scheduled for Saturday, September 11, from 3-5:30 at the Peachtree Branch of the Atlanta Public Library.

Posted by chuck at 10:54 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

September 6, 2004

I'd Love to See This Acceptance Speech

Michael Moore has announced that he will not submit Fahrenheit 9/11 for consideration for best documentary, choosing instead to pursue the Big Prize, best overall picture. My guess is that Republican anti-hero Moore, with the help of Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein, will likely score a nomination for picture and/or director, but I simply don't see the film winning the overall prize.

One effect Moore's decision will have is that it will clear the way for another documentary filmmaker to gain some well-deserved recognition (my money is now on Control Room, with Super Size Me a sleeper pick); however, his decsion, according to his website, is based on the hope that he will be able to screen F9/11 on TV before the November election, which would disqualify his film from the documentary competition because of a silly and outdated rule that prohibits competing documentaries from being shown on TV within nine months of their theatrical release.

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Capturing Links

I've nearly completed my Fight Club essay and have decided to start thinking about my SAMLA paper (second entry) on Capturing the Friedmans (IMDB). I'm hoping that creating an overlap between these projects will ease the turbulence I typically feel when moving from one project to another. I'm also aware that the MLA job list will be coming out soon, so I'd like to get some momentum going on the paper before I start worrying too much about the job list.

At any rate, my Capturing paper focuses primarily on the film's extensive use of home movies, the archives of Super-8 film and videotape collected by the family. Many of the reviewers have noted the connections between the Friedman family and reality TV (Cynthia Fuchs of Pop Matters also mentions the now defunct Jennicam), and what I've found interesting here is the implicit connection many of these reviewers make between the "juridical" aspects of the film, the questions of Arnold and Jesse Friedman's guilt, and the use of family footage, that is the "truth" of documentary footage. In fact, unlike Roger Ebert, I find the film is pretty clear in its assertion that Jesse and Arnold Friedman are not guilty of the crimes for which they were charged (Arnold's collection of illegal viewing material is another matter).

However, I'm less interested in the film's treatment of innocence and guilt (even though I originally pitched the idea of reading the film as a "trial documentary") than I am interested in Capturing's fascination with self-documentation--the "reality TV" aspect of the film. It's worth noting that much of the family's footage was captured in the 1970s and '80s, soon after the Loud family became one of the first families to have their lives broadcast before a national audience, something I think that Elvis Mitchell hints at in his New York Times review (without mentioning the Loud family or their PBS series by name). I'm just starting to think specifically about this paper, so these ideas are a bit scattered. In fact, I'd originally just planned to bullet point a few links.

One or two other quick points for now: David Denby's New Yorker review, reprinted in its entirety inside the cover of the Capturing DVD, looks particularly useful for thinking about this paper, and Debbie Nathan's Village Voice article supplements the film reviews nicely. Nathan is a journalist who has written extensively on the case, and notes among other things, that David and Jesse were orginally very suspicious of director Andrew Jarecki's questions. Specifically they were concerned about Jarecki's "repeated questions about whether Arnold molested his sons." She also provides a bit of detail about Jesse's thirteen difficult years in prison, something the film doesn't really discuss in much detail.

Again, I'm still in the early stages of planning this paper. Hopefully I'll have more to say in the next few weeks.

Posted by chuck at 11:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 4, 2004

Shock Corridor

Now that I'm getting settled into fall semester (three weeks down), I'm trying to watch more "escapist" movies. Last night, it was indie movie guru Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor. Shock Corridor is the 1963 film that the cinephiles are watching during the opening sequence of Bertolucci's The Dreamers, and after seeing Fuller's film, I can see why the French New Wave filmmakers admired it so much.

Shock Corridor is about Johnny Barrett, an ambitious newspaper reporter who hopes to win a Pulitzer by going undercover as a mental patient in order to solve a mysterious murder. In the opening scene, Johnny trains with a psychiatrist friend, learning to perform the symptoms of mental illness in much the same way that a college student might cram for a final exam. His girlfriend, a stripper with an intense affinity to her feather boa, worries that Johnny will get caught--or worse, that he will become insane because of his exposure to the patients in the asylum. The film is shot in gritty black-and-white, with several long shots of "the street," the long hallway where the patients congregate to socialize. In addition, there are several surrealistic shots of dreams and fantasies that disrupt this grittiness in fairly complicated ways, but I don't want to describe them in too much detail because the pleasure in being surprised by these shots was so much fun.

Once inside, Johnny begins having nightmares involving his girlfriend and her career as a stripper. At the same time, he slowly makes progress on solving the murder by talking to the three principle witnesses, all of whom are trauamtized by both the murder and their own pasts. These witnesses include: a southern Korean War veteran who claims to have been brainwashed by the Communists and now believes himself to be a Civil War soldier; a black man who as a child crossed picket lines to attend a formerly white college and now believes himself to be a white supremacist, and a nuclear scientist who has regressed to the mental capacity of a two-year-old. All three patients offer some version of satire on late '50s America, including the paranoia that produced McCarthyism, segregationism, and the Cold War. In an odd way, the film reminded me of the more recent--and less overtly political--spoof film, Bubba Ho-Tep (my review).

Many of the reviews I've seen downgrade the film for its tabloid style, but that's what makes it so enjoyable in my opinion. The pseudo-Freudian language and the false seriousness make the film a great B-movie experience. Another reader of the film faults the film for showing the world outside the asylum as being equally "grim, painful and downright weird as that inside." In a sense, that seems to be the point of the film; the "outside" world is just as crazy as the asylum, if not moreso. I'd also disagree with the claim that the film satirizes "America’s demand for over-achievement." It's not the desire for over-achievement that dooms the black patient to madness; it's the fear and paranoia of the community around him. But no matter what, for the next few days, I'll be walking straight to the Samuel Fuller shelf at my local videostore.

Posted by chuck at 1:50 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

September 3, 2004

Convention Keywords

Cool New York Times graphic counting the keywords used by speakers at this year's Democratic and Republican conventions. Not surprisingly, Republicans were more likely to mention the war, although this number was closer than you'd think, while Dems were much more likely to mention jobs and health care (big surprise there). Perhaps the biggest contrast: Republicans mentioned Kerry nearly eight times more often than Democrats mentioned Bush.

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Conventional Wisdom

After watching George Bush's campaign speech last night, I was relieved that I had not yet completed my annual ritual of watching Dazed and Confused. After a slash and burn Republican convention, I needed something to make me feel better about the world, and Linklater's film provided that. I was even able to indulge my nostalgia for a world before anyone in the Bush family had ever been President, and this time around, Ben Affleck's presence in the film didn't even bother me. I think I needed that escape pretty badly, especially after watching so much of the convention this week. I did the full marathon--keynotes all four nights (then again, Jenna and Barbara Bush were utterly fascinating).

I've been following a few documentary film stories that are worth noting. First, Warner Brothers has decided not to distribute David O. Russell's 35-minute anti-war documentary. The docu originally was to accompany a re-release of Russell's vastly underrated Three Kings, which I regard as one of the best films of the 1990s. Warner's decision follows Sony's decision to back out of a deal to distribute Control Room on DVD. Lion's Gate, which also distributed F9/11 in theaters, wisely stepped to the plate and will distribute instead. Still, it's rather discouraging (to say the least) to see major studios balking at distributing political material.

Russell's documentary will find an audience, possibly through MoveOn.org, but Warner's decision is pretty chilling, and based on the language of the Times article, I don't think that Warner's decision is a financial one, or at least it's not simply financial (look at the success of "political" docs like F9/11, Super Size Me, and Control Room). Instead, Warner claims to be concerned about violating campaign finance law. Russell's comments about the documentary's role in showing audiences the effects of war

prompted Warner Brothers to ask its lawyers if the documentary might run afoul of Federal Election Commission regulations, or constitute a so-called soft money political contribution. Though the legal opinion was unclear, the studio decided not to release a film that might be construed as partisan ahead of the election. The president of Warner Brothers, Alan Horn, is an active Democrat and wanted to avoid the perception that he was using the studio to support his own political convictions, studio executives said.

Not much else to add here except to compliment the independent studios who are still willing to release these films.

I finally got a chance to watch one of those documentaries, Bush's Brain, the other day, but hadn't had time to blog it. But, as promised, here's a quick review. Brain is based on the book by James C. Moore and Wayne Slater about Karl Rove's role in promoting George W. Bush to the Oval Office, and I've gotta admit that I was somewhat disappointed in this documentary. Yes, it shows Karl Rove engaging in political dirty tricks. Or at least people suggesting that KR has been engaging in dirty tricks. But, for one, there's no real smoking gun, at least in my memory of the film. The films' claims seem closer to a "man behind the curtain, pulling all the strings" approach.

This "gotcha" approach isn't very satisfying, and it doesn't really offer a compelling reason to vote against George Bush. There's very little information about the effects of Bush's policies, and instead we get a laundry list of Karl Rove's dirty tricks, dating back to his early triumph in running for national office in the Young Republicans. The film's website comments that Rove is the person "the person who many think is calling the shots at the White House." These kinds of allegations are little better than Fox's "some people say..." ploy, described in Robert Greenwald's Outfoxed, and they say little about Bush's policies.

I want to be clear that I'm perfectly happy to see Rove being criticized and to see people bringing his dirty tricks to light, but there's nothing in the film that takes us beyond criticizing these dirty tricks. The film seems to take the election process at face value, identifying the one bad apple rather than considering larger problems about political campaigns (including the very problems that prevented Russell's documentary from being released).

Posted by chuck at 7:34 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

September 1, 2004

Live From New York, It's the Zellacious One!

Okay, I think it's pretty well-documented that I'm no fan of Zell Miller, but playing "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" when he walked onstage was pretty funny.

Update Scroll down the comments to find a full transcript of Zell Miller's one shining moment.

Posted by chuck at 10:05 PM | Comments (20) | TrackBack

Unofficial Announcement

I have now booked a location for an Atlanta September Project event. The Peachtree Branch of the Atlanta Public Library, 1315 Peachtree St. NE, will be the place to be on September 11. The room is available from 2:45 to 5:45 PM, so for now, I'm planning to get things started at 3 PM.

Once everything is official, I'll be sure to provide complete details.

Posted by chuck at 1:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

the chutry experiment