together ask us to pause and ponder-and indeed relativize-such transformations

and ways of seeing them in the shadow of past texts, conceptions, practices, and
institutions.
I am grateful to my Concordia colleagues on Visible Evidence Organiz-
ing Martin Allor, Dan Cross and Elizabeth Miller, as well as our sterling
doctoral-level collaborator Gerda Cammaer, for helping make the publication of
this sampling of Viz Ev XII ventures in documentary historiography possible. The
conference could not have happened without the financial support of Concordia
University's Faculty of Fine Arts, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Office of the
President, and Centre interuniversitaire en arts mediatiques, as well as the generous
contribution 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 William
Wees for his generous help with editing these texts and to the journal for allowing
us this important podium.
THOMAS WAUGH teaches film studies at Concordia University, Montreal, where
he has also developed an interdisciplinary curriculum around AIDS and in queer
studies. Among his publications are The Romance of 1tansgression in Canada:
Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas (2006) and "Show Us Life": Towards a
History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary (1984). 'TWo volumes of
his 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 travai-
lJeurs de la" Westinghouse Electric and ManUfacturing Company (1904), produites
par I'American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, permettent de repenser Ie cinema
radical selon Ie concept de la " radicafisation " derridienne. L'auteur va au-deja de
C.S. Peirce;, et Ie contourne, pour identifier dans Je documentaire radical une indexicalite
marxiste 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 de
la production sociaIe de I'oe'uvre qui est Jiee a sa temporalite historico-materielle.
I
n Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida's reflections on the end of Marxism,. he
asks, "But what does 'to radicalize' mean?" He goes on: "It is not, by a long
shot, the best word. Jt does indicate a movement of going further, of course, and
of not stopping. But that is the limit of its pertinence The point would be not
to progress still further into the depths of radicality while taking a step in the
same direction." Derrida, it would seem, is cautioning against going down the
saII1e roan again. But while he doesn't want us to proceed in the same old way
into the "depths of radicaJity," he returns again and again to what he calls 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 his-
torical "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 "heirs
of Marx and Marxism," our legacy not only a project but a "promise," and not only
a philosophical project.
3
Beyond the performance of the "radicalization" or the
radical critique, that is, beyond deconstruction, which Derrida sees as a radical-
ization of Marxism itself, the spirit of Marx is there in the reminder of that part
of the project which is the production of events, that is, "new effective forms of
action, practice, organization. "4
Further, in Derrida, and to get closer to our topic, this momentous second
end of communism has also been coincident with and is thus seemingly one
among other "ends of things," whether the "end of history," the "end of ideologies,"
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES' REVUE CANADIENNE D'ETUDES CINEMATOGRAPHJQUES
VOLUME 16 NO.1' SPRING' PRINTEMPS 2007 PP 5.24
or the "end of the greatemancipatory discourses." But, he goes on, these are
ends that should remind us of what it is that has not been ended. Why proclaim
these ends, he says, when there is still no end of world suffering? In a surpris-
ingly passionate passage, Derrida implores us to leave off celebrating these ends,
and instead, "Let us never neglect this obyious microscopic fact, made up of
numerous singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore
that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and
children 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 eman-
cipatory discOl.j.rses phd the multiplication of sites of suffering, the effect of the
termination of the one seen in the proliferation of the other. But this intimation
of consequence relies on a crucial reverse causal connection, a connection that
could 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 analyt-
ical answer as well as the antidote-socialism.
Perhaps then Derrida's call to "never neglect" is a tribute to the resilience
of the Marxist lightning narrative of social transformation, which goes something
like this: material conditions cause consciousness change causes social rebellion
causes society changed. And yet this theory of social transformation needs con-
stant reassessment. In the following, we will want to know if "radicalize," although
not, as Derrida thinks, the best word for whatever it is that happens, has something
to do with the relation between the great Marxist emancipatory discourses and
the "obvious microscopic fact" composed of "sites of suffering." This is the
relation addressed here as that between evidence and aspiration, the evidence of
material conditions and the aspiration to transform the world.
6
Finally, this for-
tuitous connection will be wrapped into what I call the question of a possibly
" Marxist indexicality as it relates to still and motion photography, situated in
answer to what became known in film theory as the "critique of realism."?
Clearly evidence and aspiration are only two aspects of a complex set of
determinations that we would want to ask about in any attempt to discuss the
politicization of consciousness around historical events, this, an accepted way of
referencing, for instance, the "radicalization" of t h ~ work force. One wonders
how far the concept of radicalize has evolved from an earlier meaning which has
to do with rootedness, as in its botanical or mathematical usage. Derrida, as was
Marx, is interested in the radix or root by which things should be grasped, but
now the root stands for questions about the ontology of Marxism itself. It is even
the root, or the radical (sometimes "fundamental" or "originary") that might "call
for questions" about Marxism in the discourses that "call themselves Marxism."8
The radical would then seem to require the genealogical. But also, these are the
conditio'ns of the hauntology, the goings and comings, which means that the
question 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 of Marx, the hovering specter that enables the
linkage between the historical-microscopic evidence of social conditions and the
aspiration for something better. In the interests of the hauntology let us consider
images from two moments in the American labor past, from 1911 and 1904, .
taken in reverse chronological order-one, an early media event, a most obvious
and microscopic moment in U.S. history, and the other the production of early
factory film footage. There are few events more hauntological than the 'Itiangle
Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911. Soon after the outbreak of the fire, photographers
from 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 the
months following, the Triangle Fire photographs became a factor in the radical-
ization of New York's female work force, helping to tell the following story as a
story of the exploitation of labor by capital.
On Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, near closing time, a fire broke out
on the ninth floor of the Ash Building in New York City. Garment workers at the
Triangle Shirtwaist Company were trapped on that floor. What happened to them
was the direct consequence of management policy, a policy that indicated a
greater concern with potential theft than with worker safety. The management had
locked the exit doors, and the fire escape had buckled in the heat. Of the five
hundred company employees, one hundred and fifty-five died as a consequence
of the entrapment. Some w ~ r e burned alive on the shop floor and others died as
the result of injuries sustained from jumping out the window onto the pavement
nine floors below. Soon in circulation were black and white photographic images
of their bodies heaped like abused garments on the sidewalk (Figure 1). The
DOCUMENTARY RADICAlITY 7
MJL.. .GLK4 XJj"M
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 New YOI City, March, 19t 1 (hand-tinted
sli<!e). Hadwin Collection, !\heel Center, Cornell Unilleffiity.
Even and especiaHy the poveny of the hand-colored realism, rendering the
a tableau and stimulating its sense testimony, places the image in another
register. Likewise, the magic lantern show series elongates the family
aftermath 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 poignant
a paradoxical supplement to their apparent microscopic factuality, An earlier
to documentary wou.ld find dishonesty in the affective aesthetics of fic-
suspicion of sentiment, held in low esteem, in contrast with the sober
of the black and white photograph, but in taki11g this position we
ncomfortably aligned with a very Gliersonian moralism. However
these photographic images participate in waves of semiosis, sig-
ty of the New York sweatshop, the plight of female workers, the
lilies, as well as lhe rumbling public outrage. The daub of flesh
ly failed realism, is finally redundant ill an image that ralls
we locate il exactly where photographk realism both falls
eeds Hs political rhetorkal goal. where it flatly states and over-
I'\tt1l:'\lmeiming majority who lost their lives were young immignmt women. an
of nineteen, many of whom were at the time supporting their italian
fiimilies with the small wages they earned.\!
se, a public funeral and march that drew one hundred and twenty
was organized by the international Ladies Garment Workers
U.) and the Women's ihlde Union League (VlT.U.L.). Clearly,
a rallying cry for these two groups, which had successfully orga-
women industrial workers fot tile frrst time In 1909 and secured a work
safely agreement with manufacturers. The'liiiingleCompany, however. had
ed 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 understood
intheciassic sense as a radicalizing event, having its dramatic consequence in
law reform in the state of New York. But here our subject is the political
engine of the photographic Image. appearing relatively early in the history of the
mass circulation ofseusations for the eye, when the vehicles of distribution were
more uneven and than we might have imagined. Testimony to uneven
technological development, another set of'Iliangle Fire images exemplify the pr'-
cinematic magic lantern sUde show that continued after the advent of cinema.
Considering the hand-colored images of bodies in the morgue from a magic
lantern slide show series, we want to gauge the values added to the photographic
sign, Rather than dismissing the magic lantem show as either a
holdover or an aesthetic throwback to Victorian sentiment, it must here pass Its
political test, no! in spite of but because of its emotional appeals. And since
recently film studies has been asked to understand what realism does for melodrama,
we would want, reciprocally, to ask what melodramatization does for the political
a$;pirations of photographic realism, The short answer to this question is that.
all assumptions about emotion as engendering powerlessness and
mlJtwbUity, in the history of American melodrama, "sentiment enables actlon."llJ
"Viewing the Unfortunates at the Morgue" (Figure 2), aile of a number of
pho
t
lilgraplllc still images of the morgue interior that were in circulation, here as
an illustrated lecture, calls lnto question the valence of the non-photo-
For instance, the original was hand colored, which may at first
Jilsprodudng an obviously fake realism. The gruesome scene has been
hastily, but awkwardly. "touched up," that is, the images of the corpses
ant wornen (not the corpses themselves) have been daubed with
shade ton orange. The coloring is disconcertingly false,
sorrowful scene. a wrong note that
ne as a sign of early apolitical
The arrangement of the row of open c
as the factory assembly line itself, and in
Mem as cruelly exploited as they were in life. But
poUtica! martyrdom change this reading?
ru;;tonIy "analysis" but with "pmctice."ll Later, Ernst Bloch
same passage as positit:lg the "pathos of 'revolutionary-
'"1';; Afuller development of the possibilities within ft scn-
find there more dialectical room, find perhaps the
the sensale aud the rool "suffering" in the pathetic. I; In the
im4ge, expression, arousal, and suffering are bound together, the
suffering held to be synonymous with "viewing the unfortunates
pathos,16 But where is our original question? II may seem that we
from the conjunctnre of the evidence of conditIons and the aspiration
to But surprisingly we are brought closer to this nexus, brought back
to question because the::friangleFire images testify to the insurmountable
distance between the evidence of oppression and the imagination of a better
wodd" As these images indicate and magnify they stand for the enormity of the
rlifliculty of overturning, a difficulty signified in the plight of the immigrant
. workers whose only way out of the burning sweatshop was to leap to the pavement
The 'ltiangle Company's exploitation of female immigrant workers is here sImul-
taneously proven and dtarnatized. Yet anger, analysis, and protest still have to
conjured out of the events to which the photographic images are the perfect Wit
ness, Most importantly for the poHlicization of consciousness, alit of these events
nU.l$t CQme their GlltLtllesis, For a Marxist ontology must answer industrial disaster
(the disaster of the garment industry's brutal extraction of value from immigrant
labor) with the discourse of emancipation, the contenlS of which is a concrete
ulopiani.sm,
Ernst Bloch, the lone Marxist theorist of the utopian, has done the most to
fill out politic.al as what he called "anticipatory consciousness,"
antIcipation understood in relation to hope, which he insisted was a "mllltant
QPtimism.'m The authenticity of hope is here developed as against vague wishing
llUleomrnensurate with dreams of an absolutely possible better world, and an
horizon of expectation, Relevant for us, Bloch seems to make utopian
_l1tm11ton contingent on the experience of intolerable social conditions. In Bloch,
in hand with the of how bad the world is," is tlle
of how good it could be if it were otherwise, Thus far. how-
...l'IO(;l:l'$ uliUtyin film theory has been limited to studies of music and the
an acknowledgement that his theory is overdeveloped on the
sforming 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, III
may be depicted in "wishing pictures/ and even associated
tecbnology," where is always a "plcturi.ng
In 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 the
social lntert'st of the nOt yet radical nor even documentary mode of the actoolitf!
(the view or vile), conventionally assigned 10 the period 1895.,..1917Jl We would
<15k why in the history of U.s. social protest imagery, in the first decade of the
twentieth century, there appears to be no radical motion photography tradition
tllatdevelops immediately out of the photographic slili image trildjtkm associated
wltltJacob Rlis and Lewis Hine.
u
Certainly the Triangle Fire photographs parallel
tllemotion picture sodal contrast dramas epitomized by D, W. Gl'rffilh's A Comer
in Wheat (USA, 19(9); however. because they attempt no class analysis, such
fictions have been politically suspect.
13
But here we are asking about
an l'w'n less Uke!y antecedent: the 1911 'ltlangle Shinwaist Pi re magic lantern
shoVi', neither exactly news nor Vict()rian melodrama, a series of images designed
but not yet in motion. A narrated news event beconws an outburst
outcry against industrial exploitation and for justice on behalf of young,
female victims, immigrant poor, trapped by villainous capital. While
theory past we would haw hesitated to even consider the political
of this work, lacking as it is in the reqUisite class analysis. in a new
moment, considering the pohtics of suffering seems imperative, and
I wam to suggest that there is in these photographs a crucial pre-
if not a funaament.
14
This I find in the photographic image of the cold
echoed in the image oj' the cold slab-like coffins in the morgue, There
hkh these broken bodies appear to have been carelessly flung out
window, heartlessly discarded, showing up in the morgue as
se. The consequences of industrial labor exploitation laid out on
is now laid otll. in the morgue J'or aH to see, "to be viewed." But
the mle, "Viewing the Unfortunates at the Morguee" tells us what
to do with the photograph: to view it as evidence of the horrific
of human life into valueless debris-a sign so symbolic and yet
interests me here is the perfecl coincidence of melodramas hyper-
wanl to address as reality's viewable index. !f we were to
claim the photographic Images of Triangle Fire for a radical
graphy tradition, we would have to do so on the basis of their
For one thing, the photographic index is a lesson in causality. It
usallty, that is, if we seiectively read c'S. Peirce, who sometiml's
relation cran experiential connecliOl1 between the indexical sign
When, for instance, in reference to the photograph, he says,
latter is known to be the effect of the radial ions from the object
ant! highly infonnatJve."l; With objects and events "physl-
". with the signs of them, the slgn,effects poinling hack to their
the great emancipalOry discourses, "., We have recently wondered a great deal
about the ascendanc' of the digital over tlle photographic image, but cause for
more concern should be the ascendance of the digJtal and the perceived demise
of Marxism worldwide,35 I! may be "just a coincidence," and then again, it Iflay
not 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 talking
about Marxist indexlcaWy ,1S a way into the problem of the historical relation
between documentary and radicaHty, toward index, genealogy, and action, and
a way of confronting two fell losses. Ideally, a theory of Marxist indexlcality
would also help to define the tradition that has encompassed such classic black
white political films as Strike (USSR, 1924, Sergei Eisenstein), Las Hurdes!
Lt111dWithout Brerui (Spain, 1932, Luis Bunue!) ,AHsi:reau 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 so
tely for socialist and Leftist projects, What exaclly was Jt about the
privileged (Indexical) connection of motion photography to the teem.
world?H We have already seen that indexical privilege contributes
ing to one of the forks of the radical cause-the evidence of material con.
Yet there IS something starkly missing that Marxist theory strives to add
is made to move. lndexicality names photographic privilege and
to shore up a chain of causality, but stops short of the composite
lesson 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:' that the mOVing image that depicts working conditions is, in
an object lesson in the Marxist concept of determination, tentatively,
to consider the production of images-in-motion out of the still image.
allows us to raise the question of the best expectations of
in relatIon to the dominance of the moving image aetua/ite
lJue), in the first decades of the twentieth century, IneVitably and
this becomes a question of the earliest factory filmK
36
By factory
we would not mean the first IndmHrial relations film, the
Leaving the Factory (France, 1895), significant, as it has been
S llepi'j:;tl' on of cheerful workeffi leaving the plant But here the
us with an ,1hnost insurmountable research question, per-
uence of a suspicious attraction-repulsion, For while the moving
would appear to be at first enamored with other machines, that
of the cinema century, over the course of that century, the
would seem to develop an increasing antipathy to industrial
that ls, to worJu"rs'i\t-work, German radical filmmaker Hamn
evidentiary sign par excellence.
16
The photographic
bodies themselves, also a Peirda "pointing finger," indicating
the 1'riangle Company as the source of the fire that caused
the young immigrant women. If the photographic so indisputably
plJIJ1ts.what more could be achieved politically by putting the photographic still
into motion? One would need to follow the moment into its progression, tracing
that mt;ment as it is made to mt;ve, as it disappears into the moving image. And
:We would want movement tu come back out again, perhaps in the form of bodies
now mobilized, enacting what I have elsewhere called Ule poliUml mimetic, that
is, energized "hody 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, we need to
address thtt issue of our own representational relations to that world, to the social
world "in which. Thus I would be remiss not to comment further on Derrida's
reference to an "obviously microscopic fact, madtt up of numerous, singular sites
of suffering," this, from the theorist in whose name the knowability of just such
phenomena has often been questioned, This, from one of the major inspirations
for the skepticism of the politics of tumJl1g the camera on an empirical world, so
often, beginning ill the 1970s, articulated as Ihe preferred politics of a critical
modernism}S So I shomd confess that I'm using the Derrida of Specters oft,tarx
as a way around the problem of how 10 represent sites of suffering as really exist-
ing, but also to ask if it was perhaps less a Derridian than an Althusserian pro-
hibition that underwrote the "critique of in film theory. This is also,
withont breaking entirely with useful realisms, to stoke the fiJe of critique within
a newer documentary film theory. For while Altlmsser has recently been sub-
mitted to re-examinatlon along these lines, the assertion that real" is always
ideological is still absolutely foundalional and not an assertion that we would
want to abandon.
z9
Still, in the Marxist tradition, the real historical trumps every-
thing, Even after the Althusserian challenge to the experiential, as always, as in
Engels, the ideological is countered by real, active men on the basis of
real life-process}O My discussion, then, coming after, and indebted 10, the
ar"''''.'''''''''''.'' of the "critique of realism," should be taken as a subtle "critique
ioJ1tUMZI'it1(lUe of realism,"or Marxist indexicallty and its discontents. That is not
aJl.Ll?E!rlliIOS, While we are at it, we should also begin to consider how the resur-
references to the photographic index might be part of this
the critique of realism. ".!
to the interest in the index as a theoretical alternative to that
ion that should interest us more, a devel-
in the termination of the indexical connection to the
more monumental turn of things which should
. This is the coincidence of the felt loss of
and the loss of Marxism, referencing Derrida's "end of
.wXL
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 the
foreman watching, the matron takes the seat of thc worker while the other :;[;lnds,
if we hypothesize thai actions are "for lhe camera," we still n:ahze
Ihal wc are the miHlagi?mei1t the matron who enforces
rules and procedures, and suddenly belore us is revealed an
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 worker
at: her machine. Here is whf'l'c the docuIni?ntary camera, moving inside
relations, 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, Arbeiter
Vertassen Die Leaving thel'actory (Germany, 19951, notes the
incommensurability between the camera and the shop floor. li is 110t just that no
tradition of working Minside" the factory emerged with the familiar trope of
Mleaving" the faclOry, he says, but that by the end of the century the motion pic-
tutl?, first altracted to, is now, in his terms, MrepeHed" by the factoryF
So we should be qui!elnterested in Girls Wifuiing Amwfures (figure 3), an
exception found within it group of 1904 illlilgCS of the Westinghouse Electric and
Manufacturing Company, shot nine yearll after vVorken; Leaving the Factory, The
Vv'estinghouse Works films an American MUlOscope aud Biograph
sedes of seventeen acrualiMs shot at the company plant in East Pittsburgh,
I'eIGmlVI'iarl.ia. by Bmy Bitzer, later renowned as D.W Griffith's cameratnan, While
the majority of these films are exterior public relations shots of the Wt'stingbouse
plant, five interior films depict women engaged in several phases of the machine
production of electrical equipment. Girls Winding Arrnarures is dearly not in the
"workers leaving the factory" tradition, amI it certainly has no relation to the
wc:l,11 reform tradition of photographers Jacob Rils and Lewis Blue, to which 1
have referred.
is
To stilrt to look for the rationale that explains the L'x!stence 01
this 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 all
ideal inadvertent cinema subject
The premise behInd the Westinghouse factory footage would appear to be that
the electrical facwry shop floor is a nowpossible subject, newly discovered-not
different from any other modem buiIding interior, no longer"hidden from view)"
tlOW explorable, by mution photography, Except that Ihe premise of the aetualite
was not that one thIng, in the course of one minute, could bewrne another. In
Girls Winding Amwtures, there is no anticipatioll that the subject that hegins as
IIMxlem workplace organizallon would tum, in the process of filming, into any-
else, Yet here is where movement introduces, ever so gradually, and as yet
mlCJX!clXsmlcally, the possibility of seeing change {lver time, of watching processes
and coooitiomi. everything in the workplace means showing mute
thall ,rihe rotational motions of gl'amingmachinery-it means alSD showing the
silJ:lefllISl;Ay motIons, that is, the motions of superVising female electrical industry
Of course the camera docs not set out to show supervlshJfl. That is the
is early in the evolution of the tradition that would become cinema
VlIW'I,f!i:,(!1!lC tradition in whleh the frame is effectively taken by surprise, Or. in
ternlil1oilogy, where the "unexpected" has been framed.
J9
In
the>re Is no such expectat!<m. The moving picture camera plants
;ta:nnlS just long ('nough for One gesture ever so
o another, quite opposite gesture.
Wtrutling Armamres we sec the matron WJlk down the
worker on the right. walk back up the aisle, and
Capital, will reveal itself.
40
Here, the advantage' of the moving over the still
image, among other things, is in the spatialization of the relation of the worker
to the machine, a spatialization now a perfect spectacularization of Labor-Capital
relations, exploitation here expressed as a visible spatial ratio. By visible ratio I
mean that we see that there is sufficient space in the aisles for the foreman and
the matron to supervise, and 'for shirt-sleeved men in bowler hats to push heavy
spools down the aisle, but little space for the women workers sitting so straightly
corseted in tight rows to hammer and wind.
We do not know if the labor movement benefited from these views, but if it
did, reformers were delivered a portrait of working conditions only by virtue of
the automatic exhaustiveness of the moving picture camera. Where capitalists would
see modern workplace organization and efficiency, union organizers would see
in the view of the Westinghouse factory the lack of lighting on the shop floor as
well as the cramped spaces in which these women sat. But let us stop, here to
note the extra analytical step that we have taken. The moving camera not only
automatically delivers the view, but in its delivery of the space of the workplace,
in its unflinching study of the turn of the nineteenth century workplace space, it
could be said to have also delivered analysis-political analysis, that is, of real
histo"rical productive relations, "Showing" gradually becomes "showing up," in
a quite Althusserian-Brechtian sense.
41
And thus it could be argued that the doc-
umentary camera, even in its earliest appearance, contra 1970s feminist film the-
ory, beyond the controversial "capture," while it might not register the conditions
of its own production, could, under such circumstances, study the conditions of
industrial production, here, most profoundly, gendered work.
42
. Here, in the context of the question of material conditions causing con-
sciousness changing causing rebellion and upheaval causing transformations of
the social realm, we have a reverse of the consequential chain, the lightning nar-
rative. Where the 1911 Triangle Fire images could correlate positively with the
I.L.G,WU. and WT.U.O. organizing effort, in 1904, Girls Winding Armatures cor-
relates negatively, not as the evidence of the working conditions which could
produce the politicization which produces protest against the company, but as
evidence of exploitation which did, and had. In 1903, the year before the com-
pany confidently invited the camera crew into the factory, workers had gone out
on strike against the Westinghouse Company.43 Thus what we are seeing in these
images are the newly hired workers who took the jobs of those who struck; and
we see them working in unchanged, unimproved factory conditions. But wait. Isn't
this line of reasoning nothing more than the problematic assertion that the motion
picture camera captures the "truth of oppression"? And if this is the argument,
then we have ignored the feminist critique of realism and its prohibition against
understanding the documentary camera as able to, "capture the truth of women's
oppression."44 In retrospect, however, one wonders if the 1970s Marxist feminist
protest 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 world
was socially constructed, the assertion that "truth could not be captured" (it
could only be constructed) was not finally necessary: For Marxism already had
a theory, has had it all along, a theory which, going beyond any easy evidentiary
tendency to capture or to finger-point (to which popular Marxism may perhaps
have been historically inclined), returns us to the multiple density of determina-
tions. The critique of realism, for all of its theoretical astuteness, took too much
for 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 can
see 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 politics
because within them, in'ihis tradition, the world is seen to be solidly rooted in
social situations, growing out of them and, most significantly, determined by
them; For this rootedness I would finally turn back to a concept familiar to
Marxist thought, but.it concept perhaps even more maligned than the realism tar-
geted by the 1970s critique: we should dare to return to reflection theory, But
reflection theory with a corrective, as suggestively worked out, for instance, dur-
ing the Althusserian moment by Pierre Macherey. Here we would start from a
very basic Marxist understanding that no phenomenon can be understood, as
Macherey says, "in isolation from the material conditions which produce it. "45
Starting here, with every phenomenon rooted in material conditions, we may be
surprised to find the beginning of a return to that which has been considered
lost. To translate this into a reminder: before we participate in any nostalgia for
indexicality, we should consider what we may have forgotten, better stated thusly:
What we think we may have lost in the indexical connection-causality-we never
lost in a theory of the social production of the work, still tied to its moment, coming
out of that material moment so comprehensively in the end, or Marxist indexi-
cality, without its discontents.
In the first decades of the last century, we would of course have encoun-
tered something that sounds like the idealism of reflection theory-the investment
in a perfect identity between the image and the world. But there is good reflection
theory and bad reflection theory, and what needs to be retained and strength-
ened from Marxist theory is a science of the work as somehow, as Macherey has
also said, "subject to" or "answerable to," if not "determined by," external social
conditions,46 We recall of course the lessons of the Marxism thought to be too
mechanically or "vulgarly" determining, modified, or corrected, beginning in the
1970s, with layers of mediating institutionsY Often ignoring these layers,
activism around radical film has historically posited not a multiple but only a dou-
ble causality: social conditions as economically caused and the moving image as
able 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
1WW
the question of the political quotient of the actualite. So the question for
Marxism that the early dominance of the actualite puts on the table is whether
or not we can understand the 'aspiration, not yet to transform, but to first grasp
the social world in political terms. In answer to this, I have suggested that in
their grasp, the Biograph views of the Westinghouse Works can be understood
as both embodied social relations and simultaneously their analysis.
With the problem of bad reflection theory behind us, it might finally be pos-
sible to say that in the apparently unnarrated actualiie, the social world "articu-
lates itself" even that the actualite is produced by actuality. Now here is where
the realism" is countered by Marxist indexicality and its discontents. Since
there is a way in which social and economic determinations have been under-
stood as contributive, we see that causality, any causality, would seem to support
an 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 and
uncaused that Marxism has historically stood. There is yet the danger that a com-
prehensive understanding of causality might be side-stepped as the photographic
index is seen only as a sign that respects the historical referent, the referent that
makes its mark on the light-sensitive photographic strip. However, we have come
some distance from the concept of indexicality as taken from C.S. Peirce, first in
the early 1970s and more recently in documentary film theory, beginning around
the time of Bill Nichols's Representing Reality.49 Yes, we are aware that Peirce's
theory is a semiotics of things, and that as such it pertains more to objects than
conditions, to isolated signs rather than to of signs. And that it is notori-
ously quirky and uneven. While we wouldn't believe that we can ever have any
indexical guarantees that what was there is what was represented (our discon-
tent), we should consider what the index does do for a political aesthetics.
The concept of the indexical (even given its limitations) keeps alive the par-
adigm of economic and social causation. So Marxist indexicality may take some-
thing from the Peircian theory of indexicality but may more importantly pe a
shortcut to the question of determinations. It was Althusser who once noted that
shortcuts in the Marxist theory of determinations had been taken at times in his-
tory 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 that
may be aligned with productive overstatement, that is, with melodrama. The
supreme political value of melodramatic hyperbole may be the boost it gives the
portrayal of the need for swift change and the possibility of and the hope for
awe-inspiring reversal. At least one theorist has characterized the social change
potentlal of motion photography as approaching the miraculous. In this'regard,
political filmmaker 'and theorist Edgar Morin once said that ".. .it is perhaps in
documentaries that cinema utilizes its gifts to the maximum and manifests its
most profound 'magical' powers."51 This, he said not only with reference to
Robert 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 of the "critique of real-
ism" to name the source of this power as the social world, or the experience of
living in that world, or even the pressures of the world on representation. From
Jean-Louis Comolli, co-author of the 1969 Cahiers du Cinema editorial so instru-
mental in the introduction of the critique of realism, we have more recently an
"about face" in the form of an assertion of what appears to be the opposite posi-
tion. 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 film
draws its power from its very difficulty, wholly derived from the fact that the real
doesn't give film the time to forget H, that the wortd presses on, that it is through
contact with the world that cinema is made. "53 The real historical ever-changing
troublesome and contradictory social world would then be the essential root of
the amazing cinematic analytic. It is"no wonder that Leftist theorists Andre Bazin
and Siegfried Kracauer were so impressed with documentary power and so eager
to 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 the
same as the world it references, tells us not just that its illusion is a success but
that the origin of its power is the world it so successfully imitates, analyzes, and
brings to us. The degree to which the social world determines the cinematic
image 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 disaster
victims in the morgue swells to supplement itself. So we do not regret the loss of
the 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 that
prepares the political moment, that has assured the connection between material
conditions, class struggle, and world liberation, in movement rhetoric, in speeches,
and in song. 54 That these conditions are the basis for change, their transformation
produced 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, and
Mao Tse-tung.
NOTES
Thanks to Rod Frey for editorial help, Tom Waugh for brilliant advice, William
Wees for attention to detail.
1. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debe the Work of Mourning, and the
New International, Peggy Kamuf, trans. (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 184 n. 9.
2. Ibid., la, 14.
3. Ibid., 91.
4. Ibid., 89, 92.
DOCUMENTARY RADICALITY 19
10.
DOCUMENTARY RADICALITY 21
Jane M. Gaines, "The Melos in Marxist Theory," in The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and
the Question of Class, David E. James and Rick Berg, eds. (Minneapolis: University of
Min nesota Press, 1996), 56-71.
Karl Marx, "Theses' on Feuerbach," in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German
Ideology, Part i, CoJ. Arthur, ed. (New York: 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 root of sensate is sentire, to feel or to per-
ceive; the Latin root of pathos is pathein, to suffer.
It becomes possible to make this argument if one follows Bloch, who interprets Marx as
locating productive activity and working conditions in the material base: "Working man,
this subject-object relation living in all 'circumstances: belongs in Marx decisively with
the material base; even the subject in the world is world" (262).
Ibid., 145.
Ibid., 95.
See Jane M. Gaines, "Dream/Factory:' in Rethinking Film Studies, Christine Gledhill and
Linda Williams, eds. (London: Arnold, 2000), 100-113, for a discussion of the uses of
Ernst Bloch in film studies and cultural studies.
Bloch,46.
This span might be understood as a wOrki ng periodization, operative for the important
1994 Amsterdam Workshop. See Nonfiction from the Teens, Daan Hertogs and Nico de
Klerk, eds. (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1994). The question of the
continuity of the tradition remains an open one that might consider whether or how to
include the actualite in a wider documentary tradition. This project would go beyond
John Grierson's original conception of documentary wh ich was defined against news-
reels 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 important
re-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. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993), 351-386.
See note 11. More work needs to be done to consider the u.s. radical filmmaking tradi-
tion before Nykino, Frontier Films, and the Film and Photo League, which date from the
1930s, looking, for instance, at Paul Strand's Manhatta (USA, 1920). Astep in this direc-
tion is Bill Nichols, "Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde," Critical Inquiry
27 (Summer 2001): 580-610. The two comprehensive studies of the U.s. radical film-
making tradition are Russell Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the
U.S., 1930-42 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982) and William Alexander, Film
on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1981).
The source of this critique has been Eisenstein's 1944 objection to Griffith's melodrama-
tization 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 repeats
Eisenstein'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 narrative films made during this
period of labor discontent, for instance The Strike (USA, 1912, Solax) and Mary Pickford's
little-known film inspired by the Triangle Fire, The Eternal Grind (USA, 1916, Maurice
Tourneur). (Thanks to Crystal Schmidt for this reference).
Th e argument can also be made that a very Victorian structure of oppositions organizes
Marx'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, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: British Film
Institute, 1995), 246, says of the British documentary tradition associated with John
Grierson, precursor of the American Public Broa4casting Service special, "The
Griersonians were in the business of having audiences equate images with reality and
converting desperate real-life situations into promises of a better tomorrow:' Without
challenging the validity of this criticism, we can hypothesize the capacity of the docu-
mentary audience, beginning in the 1930s, to make this utopian leap.
In the Anglo-America n academy this critique is often traced to the publication of the
translation of Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Screen
12.1 (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. '(Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of Califomia Press, 1976): "Clearly, the cinema 'reproduces'
reality... " according to the ideology of realism, they say. But "'reality' is nothing but an
expression of the prevailing ideology" (25). Two examples of the contemporary critique
of the critique of realism are Rites of Realism, Ivone Margulies, ed. (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002) and Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical introduction
(London and New York Routledge, 2000), especially, 3, where the author says, "Sometimes
it seems necessary to remind writers on documentary that reality does exist and that it can
be represented without such a representation either invalidating or having. to be synonymous
with the reality that preceded it:'
Derrida, 184 n. 9.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was, in its immediate aftermath and has continued to be, a
point of reference for the labor struggle. The Women's Trade Union League analyzed the
income 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 su pport to Eu ropean dependents; and twenty-one either lived alone
or were one of two sisters who lived together. See Sa rah Eisenstein, Give Us Bread but
Give Us Roses: Working Women's Consciousness in the United States, 1890 to the First
World War (London and Boston: Routledge, 1983), 15. The definitive work on the fire
has 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 Tom
to 0.1. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001),24, where melodrama
is defined in terms of pathos and action:'
Th is is one in a series of recently discovered magic lantern slides depicting mourning
immigrant families exiting the morgue, city officials questioning survivors, and the large
ghetto funeral organized by the I.L.G.W.U. and the W.T.U.L. on April 5, 1911. The images
are part of an archive housed at Cornell University, Kheel Center for Labor-Management
Documentation and Archives, a project in cooperation with the Union of Needletrades,
Industrial and Textile Employees, begun in 1998. A recent acquisition, the Triangle Fire
series 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 urban
poor into an illustrated lecture was pioneered by Danish immigrant and police reporter
Jacob A. Riis. Perhaps the January 25, 1888, magic lantern showing of his images that he
titled "The Other Half: How it Lives and Dies in New York," long important in the
American studies tradition of photorealism, should be re-examined in the light of the
new documentary studies. See the most recent publication of the 1890 text, Jacob A.
Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (Boston a.nd
New York: SI. Martin's. Press, 1996),4-5. Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American .
Photographs (New York: Hill and Wang. 1989), discusses Riis's lantern slide images as
"sensational disclosures of hidden social facts" (170-71). Riis was no longer working in
photography after 1900. The Triangle Fire photographs would be coincident with the
career of social reformer Lewis Hine, which began with his trip to Ellis Island in 1904
and continued into the 1930s. See Trachtenberg, Ch. 4, for an overview.
20 JANE M. GAINES
11.
8.
9.
7.
5.
6.
DOCUMfNTARY RADICALITY 13
36. it is now widely understood in the field that adualites oiJtnumbered story films until at
Ieast 1903 and possibly later. One of the best publications to deal with th is phenome-
non is Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, Daan Hertogs and Nico De
Klerk, eds. (Amsterdam:.strichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997).
H.arun Farocki, "Workers leaving the Factory," in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-
Lmes, Thomas Elsaesser, ed. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 238.
Further, ~ n 240, he says that this "rhetorical figure" may be found at the beginnings and
ends of films, almost hke a "slogan:' But no communication within the factory, whether
"words, glances, or gestures" was recorded by the motion picture camera. The tradition
of "factory gate" footage has become important with the recovery of the Mitchell and
Kenyon adualite footage of industrial England. See The Lost World of Mitchell and
Kenyon, Vanessa Toulmin, Patrick Russell, and Simon Popple, eds. (london: British Film
Institute, 2004).
See note 11.
Jean-Luc Lioult, "Framing the Unexpected," Jump Cut 47 (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 placed
the burden of "showing up" conditions on political cinema.
For one of the boldest statements of the prohibition against documentary realism, see
Claire Johnston, "Women's Cinema as Counter Cinema," in Claire Johnston, Notes on
Women'sCinema (london: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973),28: "The
tools and techniques of cinema themselves, as part of reality, are an expression of the
prevailing ideology: they are not neutral, as rna ny 'revol utionary' film-makers appear to
believe. It is idealist mystification to believe that 'truth' can be captured by the camera or
that the conditions of a film's production (e.g., a film made collectively by women can of
itself reflect the conditions of its production." The important refutation of this position is
Alexandra Juhasz, "They Said We Were Trying to Show Reality-All I want to Show Is My
Video: The Politics of the Realist Feminist Documentary," in Collecting Visible Evidence,
190-215.
43. See the u.s. Library of Congress American Memory website for streamed video from the
Westinghouse Works 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 of
Essex, 1976), 42.
46. Pierre Macherey, Theory of Literary Produdion (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, "Documenting Fictions," Continuum: The Australian Journal of
Media and Culture 11.1 (1997),62, where she says that "the assumption that things are
caused, as opposed to being arbitrary and uncaused, is an aspect of the discu rsive order
of a culture:'
49. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington:
indiana University Press, 1991).
50. Althusser, For Marx, 113.
51. Edgar Morin, Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, (1956; repro Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005), 75.
52. John MacKay, Dziga Vertov: Life and Work (Bloomington: indiana University Press, forth-
coming) 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 and
Michael Renov, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
28. The history of how deconstruction made its way from French into Anglo-American film
theory 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 it
t h r o u g ~ Philippe Sollers' writing in Tel Quel, and particularly "Un pas sur la lune," Tel
Que/39 '(automne 1969): 3-12. Rodowick, 22-23, argues that it is here that Sollers
recruits deconstruction for a political avant-garde and posits the !"realism/modernism,
ideological/theoretical practice, and idealism/materialism" divides that have organized
the field for over thirty yea rs. Crucial attempts to formu late a Derridian project, especia lIy
for a critical avant-garde, can be seen in a key issue of Afterimage 5 (1974). See in this
issue Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ecriture/fiction/ideologie," from Philippe Sollers, Theorie
d'ensemble (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968), 127-47, and 'Writing, Fiction, Ideology," Diana
Matias, trans.; Noel Burch and Jorge Dana, "Propositions," Diana Matias and Christopher
King, tra ns., 84- 102.
29. louis Althusser, For Marx, Ben Brewster, trans. (1965; repro london: Verso, 2005), 187:
"The critique which, in the last instance, counterposes the abstraction it attributes to the-
ory and to science and the concrete it regards as the real itself, remains an ideological
critique, 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, a
Feuerbachian residue in works of the epistemological break. But note how much more
quickly the field was to challenge Althusserian subject positioning, perhaps as early as
the 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 recent work 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 Digital Age, Kay Hoffman and
Thomas Elsaesser, eds. (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 1998), 201-220.
33. Derrida, 85.
34. But important academic attempts have been made to disentangle Marxism from the end
of communism. See, for instance, in the U.S., Immanuel Wallerstein, After Liberalism
(New York: The New Press, 1995); Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International
Perspedive, Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, eds. (New York: Routledge, 195);
and Marxism Beyond Marxism, Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl, eds.
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). See in the latter, in particular, Fredric
Jameson, "Actually Existing Marxism," who in answer to the question "What is Marxism?"
defines it as a "problematic" with the "capacity to generate new problems," most signifi-
cantly as it encounters late capitalism (19). My reference here is thus not to any certain
development but only an observation about a hiatus and that only relative to the 1970s,
when Anglo-American academic Marxism contributed to the invention of film theory and
inspired some influential film practice.
35. See Thomas Waugh, "Why Documentary Filmmakers Keep Trying to Change the World, or
Why People Changing the World Keep Making Documentaries," in "Show Us Life":
Toward a History andAesthetics of Committed Documentary, Thomas Waugh, ed.
(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), xi-xvii.
53. Jean-Louis Comolli, "Documentary Journey to the Land of the Head Shrinkers," October
90 (1999): 38. In another reversal of the premises of the 1970s, Harun Farocki finds, no
longer heretically, that his filmmaking practice starts with the world-historical. Thus, for
radical filmmaking, the world is source: "Its signs and meanings are not put into the
world, they arise from the real. In the cinema it is as if the world itself wanted to tell us
something" (Farocki, 243).
54. See Jane M. Gaines, "Radical Attractions," Wide Angle 21.2 (2002): 100-121 for a discus-
sion of George Stoney and Judith Helfand's Uprising of '34 (USA, -1994), a documentary
film about a 1930s textile strike in the American South that has worked effectively as a
contemporary organizing film, in part because of its rhythmic aesthetic.
JANE M. GAINES is Professor of Literature and English at Duke University where
she founded the Program in Film/Video/Digital. She is the author of Contested
Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (1991), Fire and Desire: Mixed Race
Movies in the Silent Era (2001), and several edited and co-edited cpllections on
documentary and cultural theory. Currently she is working on Fictioning
Histories: Women Film Pioneers. "Documenting Reality" is part of a project called
"The Documentary Destiny of Cinema."
24 lANE M. GAINES
PHILIP ROSEN
NOW AND THEN: Conceptual Problems
in Historicizing Documentary Imaging
. Resume: La periode de 1918 a 1930 fut temoin de I'emergence du documentaire
comme pratique formelJement et semantiquement differente d'autres formes non-
fictives ., Ala meme epoque apparaissait aussi un cinema "experimental" sciem-
ment affilie aux soi-disant avant-gardes historiques. Puisque Ie terme persiste
toujours anotre ere de postmodernisme digital, nous sommes en droit d'examiner
les implications de cette persistance en rapport aI'image documentaire. Par exemple,
faudrait-if developper une approche multi-temporelle des histoires et pratiques du
cinema ~ t du documentaire? Un bon point de depart pour explorer ces implications
est I'oeuvre de Dziga Vertov, qui met en question J'opposition entre Ie documentaire
et Ie cinema experimental et qu'on peut considerer par I'intermediaire de la theorie
des medias digitaux de Lev Manovich et du concept de I'histoire sublime de .
Frank Ankersit.
T
he years 1918-30 saw the rise and solidification of broad cultural-textual regimes
of screen production still invoked in media discourses and media pedagogy.
One was documentary, which was conceptualized and named in the 1920s. This
term was coined to denote a regime of film practices formally and semantically
distinct from earlier, widespread "non-fiction" forms that also traded on the
indexicality of the film image, especially actualities. These now became regarded
by most cognoscenti not just as outmoded but as cinematic dead ends, except
when they could be read as looking forward to later cinemas.
Mainstream cinema had recently solidified as a global industry dominated
by Hollywood. Such different figures as Terry Ramsaye and John Grierson abetted
its hegemony when they implicitly (Ramsaye) or explicitly (Grierson) expelled
the 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 his-
toriography, as in the influential 1926 book by RamsayeY But at virtually the
same time that Ramsaye gloried in anecdotes of individuals whose achievements
supposedly led to the emergence of Hollywood, the "story film," and cinematic
art, Grierson invented the term documentary.
CANADIAN JOURNAL Of fiLM STUDIES REVUE CANADIENNE D'ETUDES CINEMATOGRAPHIQUES
VOLUME 16 NO.1' SPRING. PRINTEMPS 2007 PP 25-38