John Fullerton (Stockholm University) presented a paper on \u201dEarly Mexican Documentary.\u201d John laid out the beginnings of tourism in Mexico as it was made possible by the railroad that went from the US to Mexico City and was completed in 1884. Later in the decade the Boston-based company Raymond & Whitcomb was running tours to Mexico City in the winter and early spring. Photographs were taken both by the tourists and by professional photographers who catered to these visitors\u2014including Frieda Kahlo\u2019s father, Guillermo Kahlo. Fullerton\u2019s explication of this conjunction of a rapidly evolving media form (photography) and form of transportation (railroads) with tourism (and thus consumerism) to be fascinating. Of course it was these railroads that sponsored Edison cinematographers James White and Frederick Blechynden when they traveled into Mexico in the later part of 1897, taking films of the same locales that John was showing. I have often wondered if companies such as Raymond & Whitcomb sponsored travel lectures in the 1890s to lure the wealthy for such tours. One potential use of these Edison films could have been to enhance such already established illustrated lectures. The second part of John\u2019s paper was concerned with the spatial articulations suggested by sequences of photos in albums and illustrated journals. He went on to touch on some of the early actuality films of Mexico. This is work towards a larger book project on representations of Mexico by North Americans and to a lesser extent Europeans in the 19th and early 20th century. A very exciting undertaking. I am going to check on John Stoddard and Burton Holmes books to see if they gave illustrated lectures on Mexico for John. (I think they did.)<\/p>\n
Next up, Ramona Curry (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) offered a fascinating presentation \u201cThe Politics of Empire in Brodsky\u2019s Trip Thru China<\/em> (1916)\u201d provided the other official bookend in the conference\u2019s title. It synthesized material she had recently published as Benjamin Brodsky (1877-1960): The Trans-Pacific American Film Entrepreneur as a two-part monograph in Journal of American-East Asian Relations<\/em> vol 18 (2011) pp 58-94 and 142\u2013180. Benjamin Brodsky, an entrepreneur operating in China, reminded me in many ways of Edward Meyer Gross, a key figure in filmmaking in the Philippines who was active in the same period (someone I have written about in a much delayed essay). Both were European Jews with American citizenship. Brodsky had also been in the Philippines briefly ca. 1899. Curry focuses on Brodsky\u2019s travel lecture\/documentary, shown in the United States, and entitled Trip Thru China<\/em> (1916). The film was shown in select first-run theaters with a lecture \u2013in Los Angeles and New York in 1916-17. It then had a more routine release with the lecturer\u2019s spiel replaced by intertitles. This move from illustrated film lecture to something that took the form of what we now call documentary was one that Burton Holmes was doing perhaps a year or so earlier. The use of intertitles rather than a lecture was just about to become standard and routine through the Creel Committee documentaries on the war (such as Pershing\u2019s Crusaders<\/em> first shown in May 1918). She showed an excerpt of Hsieh Chia-kuen\u2019s documentary Searching for Brodsky<\/em> (2009) which included surviving material from Brodsky\u2019s China film. I am writing a chapter on the Documentary Tradition up to Nanook of the North for Brian Winston\u2019s history: clearly Brodsky\u2019s Trip Thru China (1916) was a significant instance in such a history and I am planning to make use of Curry\u2019s work in this area!<\/p>\n Bj\u00f6rn S\u00f6renssen (NTNU, Trondheim) gave an absolutely outstanding presentation. A confession: I had heard a couple of Bj\u00f6rn\u2019s presentations before and thought of them as solid contributions that operated within an existing framework. I now realize that there is a side to Bj\u00f6rn which has eluded me: his contribution, \u201dDigital Diffusion of Delusions: A World Wide Web of Conspiracy Documents,\u201d shows him to be a rock star working at the cutting edge of our field. He investigated what are arguably the most widely seen documentaries being made today, conspiracy documentaries, particularly those that focus in whole or in part on 9\/11 and the collapse of the World Trade Center. He listed five that were among the 10 most viewed works according to Google Video ca. 2008. The one he showed as excerpts was Peter Joseph\u2019s Zeitgeist: Moving Forward<\/em>. One feature that characterizes these documentaries (and perhaps many areas of documentary practice in general) is that they are being remade and reworked and released in new and updated versions. Zeitgeist has had three different incarnations. The conspiracy theory is that 9\/11 is an \u201cinside job\u201d and the collapse of the towers was the result of controlled demonstration by some nefarious part of the US government. It was thus similar to Pearl Harbor in that Roosevelt knew about the \u201csneak attack\u201d in advance but allowed it to happen to get the US into the war. Going back to World War I, the sinking of the Lusitania was a planned provocation that was arranged by the British and the US. It is part of an international banking conspiracy because these wars are a way for the banks to become incredibly rich and powerful. I don\u2019t want to summarize his article here but rather urged Bj\u00f6rn to rush his piece into print. My course Digital Documentary and the Internet, taught last spring, somehow failed to get to the guts of the topic. And Bj\u00f6rn has shown us where they are!<\/p>\n There are certain painful ironies to this. With the massive instance of conspiratorial murder, Norway has experienced its own version of 9\/11\u2014in this instance one of paranoid, right-wing terror. Perhaps Norwegian scholars have been handed a new relevance and authority to their discourse. Besides using Michael Barkun\u2019s Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America<\/em> (2003) and quoting Umberto Eco\u2019s Travels in Hyperreality<\/em>, Bj\u00f6rn cited a Norwegian scholar who is theorizing about conspiracy thinking: Asbj\u00f8rn Dyrendal, in an article titled “Denne verdens herskere. Konspirasjonsteorier som virkelighetsforst\u00e5else” in Arnfinn Pettersen and Terje Emberland (eds.), Konspiranoia. Konspirasjjonsteorier fra 666 til WTC<\/em> (2003). He, in turn, cites Dieter Groh on the intense and excessive rationalism of conspiracy theory, which appeared in a chapter called “The Temptation of Conspiracy Theory or: Why do bad things happen to good people” in Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy<\/em>, eds. Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici. And Merleau-Ponty\u2019s difficult The Visible and the Invisible<\/em>: This is to think the true by the false, the positive by the negative\u2014and it is to ill-describe indeed the experience of dis-illusion, wherein precisely we learn to know the fragility of the \u201creal.\u201d (p 40) In these conspiracy documentaries all the unanswerables are answered together.<\/p>\n Bj\u00f6rn suggested that The Eternal Jew<\/em> is a founding instance of this kind of film. And he took a suggestion from the Morris scholar at the seminar and concluded with Errol Morris\u2019s The Umbrella Man, which recently appeared on line in the New York Times. In this short video, Morris offers us a witty antidote to conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n So Saturday was an exhilarating day of presentations, and much can and should be said about this kind of format for intellectual exchange. However, that exhilaration in conjunction with jetlag and the memories of a gruesome execution scene in A Trip Thru China<\/em>kept me awake most of the night. (In addition our hotel was party central\u2014and the Swedes definitely seem to celebrate the weekend, which I was told officially begins at 2 pm on Friday). Earlier in the evening we too celebrated the weekend with an elegant dinner at a near-by restaurant, Eriks Bakficka<\/a>, Fredrikshovsgatan 4, 115 23, Stockholm.<\/p>\n On Sunday my sometime collaborator Jane Gaines (Columbia University) presented \u201cDo True Stories \u2018Tell Themselves\u2019?\u201d A sophisticated theorist who is ready to take intellectual risks in provocative ways, Jane offers something that is far too rare in our field. Given that I tend to be more mired in history, we could be seen as something of an academic odd couple. Both interested in documentary, we have quite different approaches to the nature of historiography and so \u201cnonfiction\u201d storytelling. It was probably not coincidence that we ended up at this conference together and that her presentation was in some ways the counterpart to my own. Like me, she is interested in Joyce McKinney from Errol Morris\u2019s Tabloid<\/em>, but predictably from an entirely different perspective. As she remarked in response to my presentation, she is an anti-auteurist. (Nonetheless, she also has her cultural heroes and heroines such as Oscar Micheaux, Lois Weber and Alice Guy Blach\u00e9.) In fact, her main interest was not with Joyce but with Jaycee Dugard and her own narrative of captivity (the New York Times bestseller A Stolen Life: A Memoir) and the way Dugard\u2019s story in some ways exceeded her ability to narrate and explain it. Frequently a story tells itself because we already know it. \u201cTrueness\u201d is thus an indication of foregone cultural conclusions. At the same time it also requires the caveat of the improbable. Without some element of the improbable the true becomes a clich\u00e9. In the case of Dugard it involves grasping a consciousness, which seems so improbable\u2014a woman who could not escape from the backyard in which she was \u201cimprisoned\u201d and yet could write a memoir and sue the state of California. I am afraid I am not doing justice to Jane\u2019s insights as she teased out the interplay between the probable and the improbable but certainly she, like Bj\u00f6rn, was drawing on Merleau-Ponty!<\/p>\n Mats J\u00f6nsson (Lund University) had the important task of presenting a Swedish-center subject. His \u201cInstitutional Aesthetics: The style and function of SF-journalen 1930\u20131960\u201d looked at the Swedish newsreel, suggesting some of the ways that Sweden, with its Social Democratic government, sought to maintain its neutrality in relation to an aggressive Nazi Germany. In particular Mats discussed the ways in which the SFS (Statens Informationsstyrelse or National Board of Information) shaped representations in its newsreels. Swedish film stars also worked for UFA in Germany and UFA films had a strong presence in Sweden. The SFS archives have been very difficult to access and materials lost in ways to suggest that a compromising paper trail could have been destroyed. Much of this material can bre found in a special issue of Scandia: \u201cNeutral Nazism?: Swedish-German Film Relations, 1941-1945,\u201d Scandia<\/em> 76:2 (2010): 47-79.( It is a journal the Yale library stops getting in the late 1990s. And not apparently on line.) The conference thus ended on another fascinating note as the visitors to Sweden had a chance to learn something of the history of both Sweden and its media.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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