Moving Testimonies: Documentary, "Truth," and Reconciliation

Moving Testimonies:

Documentary, "Truth," and Reconciliation

In 1993 Linda Williams observed the paradox of a historical moment characterized by "a remarkable hunger for documentary images of the real" and at the same time a "loss of faith in the objectivity of the image" (10). The present situation is increasingly inconsonant. There is this appetite for testimony, and yet our understanding deepens of memory's constructive aspect. "Remembering the gist of what happened [but mistaking the precise facts] is an economical way of storing the most important aspects of our experience without cluttering memory with trivial details," summarize Daniel Schacter and Donna Rose Addis in a recent issue of the science weekly Nature (27).

First the hunger. The will and the possibility—through increasingly available and capacious capture and storage techniques—to collect and authorize visual history testimony have never been greater.¹ The University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute intends its 52,000 videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses as an educational legacy for all time. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (it seems important to stray from U.S. media and politics better to understand them) oversaw the compilation of a testimonial archive that now includes 22,000 written testimonies, of which some 2,000 were videotaped during public committee hearings.²

Documentary filmmaking has followed the testimonial compulsion. Whereas in past decades documentary scholars have tended to view the "talking head" as evidence of a lack of imagination on the part of film and filmmaker, now, nearly fifty years after the advent of direct cinema, filmmakers, film scholars, and other historians are rediscovering the expressive power of direct address. Ten documentary films derived from testimonies in its video history archive have been produced by the Shoah Foundation.³ The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the United States has taken notice. Over the last dozen years Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000), The Last Days (1998), and Anne Frank Remembered (1995)—all involving passionate testimony about past events, all on the subject of the Holocaust—have garnered Oscars for best documentary, as has Errol Morris's The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003), a compelling and stylish documentary consisting, improbably, of a feature-length interview with former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) also accrues much of its force from the words of the people Michael Moore encounters, including, memorably, a woman unable to comprehend the death of her son, a soldier in the Iraq War. Spike Lee's magisterial When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (five, on DVD, 2006), marked the one-year anniversary of the environmental and governmental devastation of people and property on the U.S. Gulf Coast through an affecting mosaic of witness testimony intercut with footage of the catastrophic storm and surge. Here a man describes pushing his wheelchair-bound mother out of the shelter of New Orleans' Superdome stadium way down to the end where she could be among the first to be evacuated when the buses arrived. After awhile, he tells us, her constant questions ceased; his mother had died where she sat. The buses came four days later.

This is all to appreciate humanitarian achievements in video testimony over the far more common instances around the world, including in the United States, where testimony has been unheard, inhibited, or strictly disallowed. George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock's The Uprising of '34 (1995) listens to people speaking publicly for the first time in over sixty years about a massive Southern cotton mill workers' strike and the gag order that was imposed as a condition of returning to work. Although the writer Ba Jin has called for the establishment of a Cultural Revolution museum in China, there remains a prohibition against speaking openly about various different atrocities, including the mass famine of the Great Leap Forward, the massacre at Tiananmen...