I tuned into PBS’s all-color documentary of World War II in the middle of the broadcast yesterday, at which point an instructional film on how to conduct oneself in an air raid was followed by the documentary’s discussion of the East Coast cities reluctance to observe blackouts until a number. Of course, and especially coming the same weekend as Tom Ridge’s bumbling appearance on the Sunday press shows, one couldn’t help but think of the civil defense measures as an analogue for our present quandary of how to handle the risk of large-scale terrorism. Presently, the federal government’s advice is closer to the “duck and cover” campaign of the nuclear age (i.e. silly and ineffective) than in the instrumentality of air raid measures. Eventually, hopefully soon, something in between will need to be found.
What also struck me about the documentary was the difference color film stock makes. So many of our cues for understanding historicity come from film stock quality and in particular color. Thus, the frisson of watching an earnest, reverent documentary on WWII with footage that normally would signify “50s” and encourage a camp spectatorship. The end result was that the earnestness of the documentary style came across as more cliched than ever. The narration (read by Martin Sheen) had all the appropriate contemporary and liberal revisionism - I was pleased that it made mention of the experience of gays and lesbians in the military - but otherwise it could have been a History Channel offering. The problem was exacerbated by the decision to use only color footage; it was as if the filmmakers worried that shifting between film stocks would destroy the transparency of the filmmaking. Why is it that as fiction film audiences become accustomed to self-consciousness and stylized filmmaking, documentaries grow increasingly closed off to anything like modernism or self-reflexivity? The footage was indeed great, and a revelation (the footage of Japanese-American internment was particularly affecting), but it also made the piece seem like the available footage was structuring the documentary rather than the other way around. OK, I may be naive to think that documentarists don’t work like that anyway, but to the extent that they present themselves as history, they should be buttressing arguments rather than simply trying to explain a bunch of cool documents they found.
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