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Wide Angle 21.2 (1999) 60-67


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The After-Life of Documentary:
The Impact of You Are on Indian Land

Faye Ginsburg

[Figure 1]   [Figure 2]   [Figure 3]

Documentary realism aligns itself with an epistephilia, so to speak, a pleasure in knowing, that marks out a distinctive form of social engagement. The engagement stems from the rhetorical force of an argument about the very world we inhabit. We are moved to confront a topic, issue, situation or event that bears the mark of the historically real. In igniting our interest, a documentary has a less incendiary effect on our erotic fantasies and sense of sexual identity, but a stronger effect on our social imagination and sense of cultural identity. 1

George Stoney's documentaries have moved generations of audiences, students, and communities because of their consistent, clear-eyed engagement with representing what Bill Nichols calls "the historically real." But the attraction to his work has always been based on more than the insights he offers by moving from worldly stories to their screen representations. Stoney's work always takes the next step in an expanding spiral of social imagination, moving from the documentary text back into the world, to see what it might accomplish, imagining how the "rhetorical force" of the stories he tells can enter back into history. Never satisfied with only engendering epistephilia--a pleasure in knowing that [End Page 61] Nichols argues is the attraction of documentary for its audiences--Stoney's concern has always been to see how his work can create new dialogues and possibilities for change in circumstances shaped by injustice and inequality, far beyond the frame of the film and its screening. Indeed, it is hard to think of Stoney's "work" as ever being confined to a film text itself, as he carefully steers his documentaries back out into the world, to see what kinds of action they might instigate to remediate conditions addressed in the text.

This kind of media practice depends on yet another trademark of Stoney's work, one that is not always visible in the text itself: the involvement of the subjects of his film in its production and distribution is the trademark of all his work, a commitment that became particularly clear when he moved to Canada in 1968 to direct the newly instituted Challenge for Change/Societé Nouvelle program in Canada. Indeed, he was the perfect person to step into that position, as few in documentary were as clear (and as legendary) as Stoney was about the importance of people being in control of the media being made about them. In his words: "People should do their own filming, or at least feel they control the content. I've spent much of my life making films about teachers or preachers that these people ought to have made themselves." 2

His film, You Are on Indian Land, the landmark documentary he produced for Challenge for Change during the two years he ran that groundbreaking Canadian program, is exemplary of the approach that Stoney developed and refined over the course of his career, reaching extraordinary catalytic potential in The Uprising of '34. Remarkably, the production and circulation of Uprising woke a southern community from its amnesia about its own violent past, when mill owners attacked their own workers who had dared to try and unionize, and helped bring about self-conscious processes of reconciliation in the present that were long overdue. But this did not happen by accident, or because of a single, hopeful television screening. The confrontation with their own repressed past was created through a long, careful process of community screenings that George and his colleague, filmmaker Judith Helfand, orchestrated as carefully as the shooting of the film itself.

The roots of that method were firmly planted thirty years earlier, when Stoney used his position as Executive Producer of Challenge for Change to push the [End Page 62] National Film Board of Canada to make good on their call to "promote citizen participation in the solution of social problems," insisting that under...

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