thinking at the interface

A while back, I mentioned Errol Morris’ latest film, “Standard Operating Procedure,” and highly recommended. (In fact, I’m looking forward to seeing it again.) The reason I’m mentioning it again today is that Morris’ film was released along with a co-authored book of the same name (written with Philip Gourevitch). And, this combined book/documentary creation and simultaneous release is also true of a film that premieres tonight on PBS called “Traces of the Trade,” directed, produced, and written by Katrina Browne. The book is called, Inheriting the Trade, and is written by Thomas Norman DeWolf. This is the wave of the future, my friends, mark my words. We will increasingly see non-fiction books combined with documentary films geared for (near) simultaneous release. I’m not great at predicting future trends, but considered this one called. This is really good news for those of us in the classroom, and it fits in nicely with the teaching strategy I’ve discussed here before of combining documentary films with scholarly readings. Now, if I could only think of a name for this trend, maybe I could get this idea published and funded. Suggestions for naming this trend are welcomed! I can pay in acknowledgments.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article up now called “Short and Sweet: Technology Shrinks the Lecture,” by Jeffrey R. Young. Here’s the first bit of the article:

Dalton A. Kehoe, an associate professor of communication studies at York University, in Toronto, has for decades won teaching awards and praise for his lectures. So when he was asked to do his first online course, a couple of years ago, he was excited to head into a studio to capture his 50-minute talks on video. When the recordings went online, however, they were anything but hits. The main complaint: They were much too long. “It was the most extremely boring thing my students had ever seen,” Mr. Kehoe acknowledges. His course evaluations, usually glowing, grew dismal. “I had to sit to down and look at these lectures and realize that when you’re looking at someone online as a talking head and shoulders in video, you just want to kill yourself after about 20 minutes,” he says with a laugh. So, for the first time in his 40 years of teaching, he decided to overhaul his lectures. He broke them up into 20-minute segments, each focusing on a narrow topic. Other professors who have ventured into online education have made the same discovery: Just because 50-minute classroom sessions are the norm on a college schedule does not make that the ideal duration for students outside the lecture hall.

Thanks to Howard Rheingold for passing this along, and for some interesting discussion following that article. Thinking of lectures in “modules” and in smaller chunks than 50 minutes I think is a smart strategy. It forces those of us at the front of the classroom to re-think what it is we really want to get across and how best to do it. There’s nothing inherently valuable, pedagogically, about the 50-minute time slot that so many of us have to deal with, these are just institutionally convenient chunks of time.

I ran across this story that is a fairly dramatic illustration of the way that digital video can be a transformative technology in the hands of the least powerful in society.  Women from 80 villages in the Medak district in India have created 12 films that chart their experience regaining autonomy over food production, seeds, natural resources, markets and autonomous media.  Under the organizational umbrella of Community Media Trust, the collective of women farmers launched their multi-media effort, titled “Affirming Life and Diversity: Rural Images and Voices on Food Sovreignty,” which includes a series of films that emerged from the action research project on sustaining local food systems, agricultural biodiversity, and livelihoods supported by fair and participatory trade.   Here’s a an excerpt from the end of the article:

t an interactive session here, Masanagiri Narasamma, 35, related how the community-led PDS taught them to revive locally-grown crops such as sorghum and millets and create local systems of storage and reach out to the most vulnerable in society.

As if to prove a point, Ms. Narasamma took out her video camera and shot the proceedings of the interactive session. Even while she was on the dais, she continued to shoot. She said they failed to relate to the advertisement-oriented form of story-telling and want to tell their success-story their own way.

“I am a seed-keeper. I store a variety of valuable seeds in the baskets in my house and with them, the knowledge of farming, environment and life. Since I learnt to use the camera, I am storing the knowledge of my communities on film and interpreting them for the world,” said Sooramma, who is in her late 40’s.

Ms. Narasamma, a dalit, said they were not allowed entry into temples and rich homes earlier. “But now even the rich allow us to touch them to pin the lapel-mike on them for a video-shoot.” While continuing with their collective, the women now plan to replicate their on-farm and off-farm activities and show the way to the world through their films.

Powerful stuff.

Thanks to my friend Howard Rheingold who pointed out the terrific work of Video Voice Collective (VVC).  This is a group that “brings academic researchers, filmmakers, technology mavens, social justice champions, and community leaders together to improve the health conditions of underserved communities.”  This is very similar to the project I’ve been working on with the shelter and the church, and with what I’m working on now with the Street Survey.   The VVC has two projects: the California Senior Leaders project and the New Orleans Video Voice.  In the seniors project, they are putting digital cameras in the hands of “outstanding senior community leaders” to enable them to “communicate the life stories, ongoing achievements, and future hopes of California seniors.”  And, in the NOLA project, the collective is working on a “community-based participatory research project that builds on the strength, motivation, and innovation of REACH-NOLA, an existing community-academic partnership.”  REACH-NOLA (Rapid Evaluation and Action for Community Health in New Orleans, Louisiana) is a partnership across a number of different agencies working to improve community health and access to quality healthcare services in post-Katrina New Orleans through community-academic partnered programs.   Pretty cool stuff.   You can follow their work at the VVC blog, here. There’s an interesting post up now about “participatory editing,” which is definitely worth reading.

There’s a nasty heat wave in NYC right now that is darn near unbearable. Having spent a lot of time, money and energy to get away from the 90+ degree heat of the place I grew up, I always take it a little personally when it’s this hot out, as if it’s evidence of some personal failure. Fortunately, there are the cool, dark pleasures of screening documentaries in the air-conditioned cool during the heat of the day to dissuade me from that existential pit of despair. So, thanks to the genius of cable, movies on demand, Netflix, and one matinee at the theater, here’s the run down on the latest batch of documentaries:

• “Roman Polanski: Wanted & Desired” (2008) Directed by Marina Zenovich. This film is part of HBO’s shameless theft of the documentaries-on-monday (not that I’m complaining, the more doc days the better.) The film is described as it was described as a film that “goes beyond” Polanski’s guilt or innocence in the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl, to look at the “media circus” that surrounded the case, which….. results in a rather interesting, if misplaced, emphasis on the publicity-loving judge in the case. It ends with a rather glowing praise of Polanski as a filmmaker, his beloved status in France (hence the title, get it… he’s “wanted” in the U.S. but “desired” in France), and text at the end that says he’s been married for 18 years and has two children, and the woman he attacked has also (rather ironically) also been married for 18 years and has three children. So, no harm, no foul, right? I mean, he’s a great artist! And, besides it was the ’60s and his wife was brutally murdered, so he shouldn’t do time for assaulting a 13-year-old.

• I caught several via this week’s installment of the original “Doc Day” at Sundance Channel. The three films I happened to record were all British and variously engaging. Perhaps the most interesting was “Philip and His Seven Wives,” (2006, directed by Marc Isaacs) about a former rabbi and his rather unconventional interpretation of the Talmudic scriptures. It’s a compelling story, but incredibly painful to watch what is basically an abusive marriage get replicated seven times. The director is both too much in the film (lots of voiceovers saying things like, “I was concerned about one man having so much power over these women…”) and not enough in the film (why this project? what is his interest in this topic?). Another offering included “Gay Muslims” (2006, directed by Cara Lavan). The problem with this film is that there’s another film that covered similar ground and did it better (“Dangerous Living,” 2007, directed by John Scagliotti). And, the third selection from the Doc Day series was “Songbirds,” (2005, directed by Brian Hall), which is an innovative blend of songs, written and performed by incarcerated women, about their experiences of abuse, addiciton and being locked up. The only problem is that the British working class accents are so thick, what the women say is almost unintelligible to an American ear.

• The InDemand feature of my cable package provided two documentaries over the weekend, “Big Rig” (2007, directed by Doug Pray).  This is a film about long-haul truck drivers and frankly, it’s a little tedious to watch and suffers by comparison to the much more dramatic documentary TV series “Ice Road Truckers.”   Doug Pray is an interesting filmmaker, though, and I really liked his doc “Surfwise” (2007) much better.   The second InDemand doc I watched was  “Transformation: The Life & Legacy of Werner Earhard” (2006, directed by Robyn Symon).  Earhard is the founder of est, and a complicated character. The film does a fairly good job of exploring some of the nuances of his story, but ultimately it seemed more of a puff piece than a critical look at Earhard.

• “The Business of Being Born” (2008, Directed by Abby Epstein, Executive Produced by Ricki Lake), came to my door via Netflix.   The film is, as the title suggests, about “the business” side of giving birth and because of that it’s a useful film for a Medical Sociology class (or any of the undergraduate Urban Public Health classes I teach), so I’m sure I’ll be seeing this one again.   (It could also be used in a Gender course, although it would take some work to unpack the assumptions about gender in this film.)   That said, the film is disappointing in a number of ways.  Ricki Lake is the Executive Producer and she is friends with (or, perhaps just friendly with) Abby Epstein, the Director.  And, herein is both the strength and weakness of the film.  It’s strength is in telling stories of women and their experiences with the “business” side of giving birth, but the weakness is we get stuck with the two least interesting women’s stories in the film - Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein.   There are a number of women, and a large percentage are women of color, who are giving birth at home, but we don’t get to know these women’s stories very well (despite watching them give birth), and the woman who is the Columbian-University-trained R.N. turned midwife that attends several of the births, and also narrates her own birth experience, is one of the most interesting people in the film, yet she is a minor character to the relatively privileged and discovering-this-all-anew Epstein and Lake.   The film also has a characteristically American view of history that begins about 1900, which is really unfortunate given this topic because there’s just so much about the conflict between the AMA and midwives that happened before that time.   Still, with a lot of work in the form of readings to supplement what’s not in the film, I could see students being very engaged by this film.

• This weekend we were delighted to learn that there’s actually a theater in Manhattan that offers a discounted matinee for the first screening (most theaters here don’t).   So, we caught an early (11:30am) screening of “Bigger, Stronger, Faster*” (2008, directed by Chris Bell)  for the bargain price of $12 for two tickets.   This film was easily the best of the current batch I’ve seen and a delightful surprise.  It starts off fairly simply with the director, Chris Bell, narrating his own experience growing up idolizing Hulk Hogan and grappling with the decision his two brothers (one older, one younger) both make to take steroids.  It then evolves into a much more complicated film that is ultimately a very thoughtful contemplation on what it means to be ‘American.’ Really well done and highly recommended.  I could see using this in a number of different classes including Introductory Sociology, Gender (sociology of the body), or Medical Sociology (and, again, any of the undergraduate Urban Public Health classes I teach).  The readings I would select to go with this film would vary depending on the class and the pedagogical goal I had for that class.

Only the last two of these made it on to the “Sociology Through Documentary Films” page. I don’t think I’d use any of the other titles for a class, but your mileage may vary, as they say.

This is a clever creation of what Google News might look like if the world were a happier, more peaceful place. It’s also an interesting study in the production of “fake news,” a slight twist on the cloaked sites I’ve talked about here before.

Yesterday, the Wired Campus, a regular education-technology feature at The Chronicle of Higher Ed, featured a short article by Josh Fischman called, “The Civil-Rights Era, Now on the Web.”   The piece highlights the Civil Rights Digital Library, that’s recently gone online.  This new digital library is created and hosted by the University of Georgia, and will no doubt be a valuable resource for scholars interested in the civil rights era.

What Fischman doesn’t mention in this short piece is that there are also groups and individuals that want to undermine the legacy of racial equality fought for in the civil rights era by using these same resources and framing them with white supremacy.   In my forthcoming book, I write about one of Frank Weltner’s sites that does just that.   Frank Weltner is a well-known white supremacist who maintains a number of racist and antisemitic sites, including JewWatch and another one called American Civil Rights Review. (I won’t provide a link to the site because I don’t want to drive traffic to it.)  On the second one in particular, Weltner draws on oral histories of former slaves recorded by WPA workers in the 1930s, and provides links to audio files and transcribed texts.   The Library of Congress has championed the collection and archiving of oral histories; and, oral histories have been used by educators to engage students about slavery, abolition and the civil rights struggle, as on another Library of Congress project website, “Voices of Civil Rights”  which features oral histories of the civil rights movement.  However, in Weltner’s hands the oral histories take on a different meaning.  On his cloaked site, he selectively compiles excerpts on a page titled “Forgotten Black Voices,” such as this quote from “Adeline, 91:”

“I wants to be in heaven with all my white folks, just to wait on them and love them, and serve them, sorta like I did in slavery time.”  

Then, Weltner uses this oral history data to “support” his revisionist claim that slavery was a “humane” institution in which enslaved people were not mistreated.   This is a remarkable use of digital media to undermine the cultural value of racial equality.   With this repurposing, Weltner takes an oral history project created by the Library of Congress intended to valorize the African American experience of surviving the horrors of slavery, a legitimate and laudable project by most standards, and transforms that same source material for calls into question that very experience and the struggle to overcome it.  Weltner uses the oral history data from the Library of Congress, and reinterprets it though a white racial frame to suggest that chattel slavery was, after all, a humane system and thereby diminishes both the harm done to African Americans in this system and white Americans’ culpability for that system.   By using language such as “Forgotten Black Voices,” Weltner draws on the language of multiculturalism.  This rhetorical choice further complicates Weltner’s attempt at revising the history of slavery because it offers the patina of credibility by suggesting Black authorship (and thus, authenticity) of his views.   This language also serves to further disguise Weltner’s political intentions and dodge any of the red flags of recognition that more overtly white supremacist rhetoric might raise.  What this means is that while efforts like University of Georgia’s new Civil Rights Digital Library cannot stand alone.  Such projects must be joined with pedagogical efforts that emphasize multiple literacies, not only of “Internet skills,” but of critical media literacy and critical race consciousness.

Virginia Heffernan has another excellent piece, “Narrow Minded,” in Sunday’s New York Times, this one about the “thinspo” videos on YouTube.  Here’s Heffernan’s description of the genre:

These videos are designed to “inspire” viewers — to fortify their ambitions. But exactly which ambitions? To lose weight, presumably. To stop losing weight, possibly. Thinspo videos profess a range of ideologies, often pressing morbid images into double service, as both goads and deterrents to anorexia. Thinspiration videos are a cryptic art with rigid rules, as much a formula as a form. As listless, pounding or archly chipper music plays, still photos of one wraith after another surface and fade. The women are generally solitary and sullen, or entirely faceless. Bony self-portraits, created in bathroom mirrors by anonymous photographers, have faces that have been obscured or cropped out. Many figures in the videos are supine, as in the pervasive hipbone self-portrait, which seems to be shot by a photographer on her back aiming a camera at her abdomen and the waistband of her jeans. A bird’s-eye shot of the thighless legs of a seated figure is also common. The soundtracks to thinspiration videos, some of which feature songs explicitly about starvation, are not subtle.

Interesting, on a number of levels.   The emergence of “thinspo” is not unique to YouTube but there are dozens (if not hundreds) of websites that feature still images and similar sorts of rhetoric.    Part of what’s intriguing about this is that it completely goes against the notion that the Internet is a place that people go to escape embodiment.   Indeed, as Heffernan’s article points out, many people go online specifically to alter and emphasize their bodies.
Of course, that these are not the only images of bodies on YouTube.  If you use the search terms “fat acceptance,” there are a host of all other sorts of images that appear.  Again, the people are using a specifically visual form of the Internet to embrace their bodies in ways that are well beyond the accepted norms of what bodies, particularly bodies designated female, should look like.

I had the pleasure of attending an event completely organized by one of my classes this semester. For their final assignment, I gave the class the very constrained choices of doing 1) a comprehensive final exam, 2) a final research paper, or 3) a video advocacy-community involvement project. They wisely chose #3. Given that I’ve had this group of students for two semesters running, and I’ve used a *lot* of documentaries in the class, and the idea with the final project was to use a film to organize a community / video advocacy / event focused on some issue related to health (broadly defined). This is the example I gave them to follow, and much a better explanation of the concept than I’m able to articulate at the moment.

And, I was quite frankly blown away by the job they did (and still kicking myself for not bringing the digital video camera). I was really impressed by all the work they put into it, how smooth their presentation was, how well organized they were, how professionally they ran the whole event, what a good turn out they had on a Friday afternoon the week of final exams.
The issue they chose to organize around was police brutality as a health issue. On their own, they reached out to filmmakers in the media department on campus who made a film called “Every Mother’s Son,” a documentary about police brutality, and had someone from the film come do a Q&A following. They opened up the discussion following for people who were attending, and several students shared stories of not being able to get to class because they were being held (for no cause) by the police because they ‘fit the profile.’ It was just a great event, all the way around.

The stand-out feature for me, though, had to be the beginning piece which I can only describe as a kind of documentary theater, along the lines of Anna Deveare Smith or Sarah Jones. They started the event with this short YouTube video, which was perfectly fine, but a bit of an odd choice I thought at first (I’ll have to add the link later, I can’t find it now). Then, several of the people from the class sitting throughout the room started reacting to the video in rather unexpected ways. One person, challenged the (white) kid in the video, asking “what does he know about Black people…” and some of them increasingly hostile to even the idea that police brutality exists. Finally, the person leading the event said, “All these comments are actual comments to this video posted on YouTube.”

It was very dramatic and effective. It’s also left me thinking about the creative possibilities of taking the comments on YouTube, which are not infrequently racist, and subverting them by placing them in another context. I was just really struck by the originality of reading YouTube comments aloud in a public, performative way, then critiquing those comments. I don’t know that anyone’s done that before. Maybe they have, but this was certainly the first time I’ve ever seen it.

And, then the class totally shocked me. They all got together and bought me this leather bound journal (because I’d been so hard on them about their writing all semester) and a fancy pen, and they all signed the book with little notes like a yearbook, and then included two big group pictures of the whole class. We all took our picture together with me afterward, and many stayed to shake my hand or give me a hug. It just went on and on. I couldn’t get over it. I can still barely take it in.

A really nice way end to a rough week and a pretty tough semester here.

So, in other non-head-banging news, as work on the book slows to checking references (yes - even though it’s at the publisher, there’s still work to be done on it), and as I begin to shift to drafting proposals for various summer projects and grading that last pile of papers, I can once again return to my multimedia, multitasking modus operandi for working, which often includes watching documentaries while I work. So I’ve added a few more to the documentary page. Some are ones I’ve been able to watch, others are suggestions sent by readers.

A special thanks to Sam Nelson, who suggested “Devil’s Playground,” (2002) directed by Lucy Walker, which I watched a couple of times.  It would be great for any number of sociology classes, and think that students would be intrigued by it as well. There is just something compelling about watching teens in traditional dress engage in non-Amish activities (like smoking), and the reverse - watching teens dressed in contemporary fashion engage in traditionally Amish-activities, like driving a horse and buggy.     I especially enjoyed the commentary in the “extras” on the DVD, which you should listen to all the way to the end.
Watching a lot of documentaries means that you end up watching a few that are just not great filmmaking, but may eventually be useful for a class here and there. Sadly, I have to put Morgan Spurlock’s latest effort, “Where in the World is Osama  Bin Laden?” (2008) in this category.  Although, I might not even be useful in a class.   Spurlock is likeable enough that at first you’re rooting for him, but the premise of the film is so contrived, and the material reality of the contrast of his life with the mission of the movie so offensive that it’s impossible to really care what happens. Spurlock’s wife/partner is in the late stages of a pregnancy when he starts out and part of his schtick in the movie is about trying to discover what would make the world safe for his soon-to-be-born first child.  All the while, he leaves his wife/partner to deal with the pregnancy alone while he travels the world.   This would be useful for a women’s studies class for exploring what unexamined male privilege looks like, but it’s not useful for much else.   And, it’s too bad as Spurlock’s first venture “Super Size Me” (2004) was brilliant in its critique of the big business of food and how it’s damaging all of us.

The really good news in documentary filmmaking is that Errol Morris has a new film out and it’s brilliant.  His “Standard Operating Procedure” is the work of a master of the form at the top of his game.  This film should be required in every Visual Sociology course, including those taught at the graduate level.  While it’s not without it’s flaws - mainly the way it depoliticizes Abu Ghirab in significant ways - as a work of filmmaking and a study in how the visual shapes and is shaped by social forces, it stands alone as a groundbreaking work.