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The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism
In a digital moment where both the democratizing and totalitarian possibilities of media are unprecedented, the need for complex, ethical, and imaginative documentary media—for you, the reader of this book to think, question, and create—is vital. Whether you are an aspiring or seasoned practitioner, an activist or community leader, a student or scholar, or simply a curious audience member, author Broderick Fox opens up documentary media and its changing forms and diversifying social functions to readers in a manner that is at once rigorous, absorbing, and practical. This new edition updates and further explores the various histories, ideas, and cultural debates that surround and shape documentary practice today. Each chapter engages readers by challenging traditional assumptions, posing critical and creative questions, and offering up innovative historical and contemporary examples. Additionally, each chapter closes with an “Into Practice” section that provides analysis and development exercises and hands-on projects that will assist you in generating a full project prospectus, promotional trailer, and web presence for your own documentary.
Broderick Fox is a media practitioner and scholar whose work explores the democratizing potentials of digital media technologies and distribution platforms, to engage challenging perspectives and subject matters traditionally excised from mainstream media. His award-winning documentaries, including recent titles The Skin I’m In and Zen & the Art of Dying, are available globally on a number of platforms including the academic streaming service Kanopy. Fox is a professor in the Media Arts & Culture Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he teaches courses on both theory and production.
Documentary Media History, Theory, Practice
2nd Edition Broderick Fox
Second edition published 2018 by Routledge
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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First edition published by Focal Press 2009
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Fox, Broderick author.
Title: Documentary media : history, theory, practice / Broderick Fox.
Description: 2nd edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017013322| ISBN 9781138677555 (hardback) |
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013322
ISBN: 978-1-138-67755-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-67756-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-55943-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Helvetica Neue by Florence Production Ltd., Stoodleigh, Devon, UK
This book is dedicated to Lee Biolos, my partner and support in all facets of life.
Preface
Whether you are an aspiring or seasoned practitioner, an activist or community leader, a student or scholar, or simply a curious audience member, the aim of this book is to unlock your approach to the study, development, and creation of documentary media.
With nearly every new personal computer arriving with factory-installed nonlinear editing software, mobile devices capable of shooting high-resolution video, and the Internet permitting the instant distribution and sharing of media, notions of who may call themselves a media maker are rapidly and profoundly shifting. Interest in documentary media has exploded, as evidenced by the proliferation of channels, sites, and programs devoted to documentary works, the emergence of interactive and transmedia documentary forms, and the upsurge of user-created content with claims to “the real” on the Internet. Yet access to technology is not necessarily synonymous with its use toward creative, innovative, and culturally challenging ends. In fact, there is often an alarming disconnect between these digital-age capacities and the potential, power, and responsibility that come with their use.
As a scholar, media practitioner, and college professor, I found myself frustrated by the absence of a single text that addressed documentary development and production in a critically, ethically, and historically informed fashion. As such, each chapter in Documentary Media: History, Theory, Practice challenges traditional assumptions about documentary form and function, presents critical theories and creative techniques, offers historical and contemporary examples for consideration, and closes with an Into Practice section that assists readers in putting the chapter’s concepts to direct use in three distinct ways:
• Analysis: A set of guiding queries and perspectives organized around the concepts of the chapter are posed that the reader can keep in mind while watching documentary media.
• Development: A series of prompts and guided exercises lead readers step by step through ideation and development of their own documentary projects. By the final chapter, any reader who has committed to the development directives at the end of each chapter will come away with:
–A project treatment
–A detailed prospectus
–A production notebook
–Templates for a participant informed consent/release form, an emergency medical form, a location release form, a call sheet, and a music release form.
• Practice: The practice sections offer a sequence of exercises and projects designed to help readers gain technical skills specific to the documentary form and to grapple handson with the historical, theoretical, and creative concepts raised in the chapters. Readers who carry out the exercises and projects with a specific documentary endeavor in mind will generate:
–Camera and sound tests
–Archival and other supplemental audiovisual materials
–Interview footage
–Footage from the field produced in a range of modes
–An opening teaser
–A promotional trailer
–A web presence for their project.
In short, critical scholars and general readers will be afforded detailed insights into the production process, the history and theories of documentary, and the ethics of representation. Practitioners will be challenged to develop works that are ethically responsible, historically grounded, and creatively and formally innovative. For educators, this book’s integrated approaches make it distinctly suited to addressing the growing importance of both media studies and media production to all disciplines.
The documentary media examples cited in each chapter are specifically chosen to represent a range of time periods, approaches, subject matters, and practitioners’ identities. Some are popular titles while others were intentionally selected over more familiar works to permit an exposure to works that readers might not otherwise encounter. All media texts discussed are readily accessible through online retailers or academic distributors. The Quick Reference: Media Rescource List in Appendix K provides the directors, distributors, and vendors associated with every project analyzed. The writing on each media example is also intended to give enough context that each need not be viewed to understand the related concept in question. Viewing the mentioned documentaries will certainly deepen the experience, but readers are also encouraged to seek out the chapters’ concepts in other works.
I am a scholar and practitioner working in the United States, but Documentary Media: History, Theory, Practice has been designed to acknowledge and examine cultural context in its questions. The production practices developed foreground cultural sensitivity and ethical considerations at all stages, from ideation and preproduction, to production and postproduction, to distribution and audience outreach and engagement. Many historical examples in this text are international in origin, and the evolution of documentary aesthetics, form, and function continues to be a global conversation. Many contemporary examples do come from the United States, but these are distinctly diverse as well. Chosen works often address international issues, and they represent a spectrum of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status both in their subject matter and in the identity of their practitioners.
The central premises of this book also encourage independence and innovation by
•exploding preconceptions and tropes of documentary form and function;
•encouraging scholars from across disciplines to think more broadly about the practical realities and representational stakes of documentary media;
•pushing makers to contextualize their work historically, critically, and ethically; and
•developing aesthetic and narrative approaches specific to the technology and means at one’s disposal.
I believe these core aims are relevant across geographies, disciplines, and curriculums, and I encourage each of you to shape the questions and processes suggested in this book to your own purposes, rather than permitting “mainstream” notions of form and function or access to “professional” technologies and budgets stand as deterrents to taking action and representing your “reality.”
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to everyone at Routledge for the opportunity to revisit this book in a second edition; to Michael Renov for years of mentorship; to my colleagues at Occidental College for their camaraderie; to my family and friends for their love and encouragement; to the hundreds of students I’ve had the honor of teaching and learning from over the years; to my documentary collaborators and participants with whom I’ve put theory into practice and in turn, developed new practically informed theories; and to all the independent documentary practitioners discussed and illustrated in this text: thank you for making courageous, inventive media that teach and inspire us all to push the form and function of documentary.
CHAPTER 1
Reimagining Documentary
Chances are that many of you come to this book with strong convictions about what a documentary looks and sounds like, what it can be about, and the role of documentary media in society. This opening chapter is designed to explode your preconceptions of documentary and to reframe the possibilities and responsibilities that come with watching and making documentaries. This involves isolating some core concepts, which far too frequently go unexamined in our daily viewing of media that make claims to the real, lived world around us. We will subject the following assumed “norms” in spectatorship and production to fresh scrutiny:
• Reality, Objectivity, and Truth: We’ll explore these monolithic concepts so frequently attributed to documentary, revealing their socially constructed nature and exploring the representational burdens we place upon documentary media both as audience members and makers.
• Subject, Form, and Function: Often documentary is defined by negation, termed nonfiction or nonnarrative. Through specific historical and contemporary examples, we’ll expand our notions of what subjects are worth representing, the forms documentary media can take, and the roles documentaries can serve in society.
• Power and the Public Sphere: We often hear about media existing in a public sphere a space of collective spectatorship and debate. What are the boundaries of this space, and is access to it really as democratic as we’d like to think? What is the line between such a forum and the private sphere that comprises each of our individual lives? Where do the forces of government and corporate control enter into the mix? We’ll address a third, often-forgotten sphere of public authority,which controls much of the media that shapes our sense of reality and ask what place and purpose independent documentary holds in the mix.
This first chapter will at times be conceptual and theoretical. Without a shared critical foundation and basic terminology, we won’t be able to watch and analyze existing works fully. Nor will we be equipped to develop and make complex, challenging documentaries of our own that surprise and energize audiences out of complacency and into active spectatorship and citizenship.
Reimagining documentary is by no means a process of breaking fully from the past. In our quest for newness we are often too quick to overlook both prior successes and other innovations that may have come before their time. As the specific examples in this chapter and those that follow will prove, history offers a wealth of renegade strategies and approaches to representing reality just waiting to be revitalized in our digital age.
This chapter is designed to be critically and conceptually freeing, opening up possibilities for pleasure, experimentation, and audacity rarely associated with documentary media production. Clear your mind of presumptions, and let us expand documentary’s social, political, and representational possibilities.
Reality?
André Bazin was a French critic who wrote extensively on film and culture after World War II, co-founding the seminal journal Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951. His strong opinions, though often contested, continue to serve as touchstones in media debates today. Though Bazin wrote primarily on fiction film, his collected writings What Is Cinema? (Volumes 1 and 2), published in 1958 and 1959, have much to do with documentary, particularly in the ways that Bazin weaves his opinions and definitions of reality, objectivity, and truth.In his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin writes:
Originality in photography as distinct from originality in painting lies in the essentially objective character of photography. . . . For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind.
(vol. 1: 13)
In plain terms, an ontology refers to a state or status of being, and as this excerpt attests, Bazin is making a strong claim for the status of images produced through the lens of a camera over those rendered by the human hand alone. He claims a particular indexicality a direct, one-to-one link between real-world subject and resultant image—that gives the photograph a claim to reality greater than that of other representational strategies, bestowing upon that image a sign of “objectivity” or “truth.”
Writing in a predigital age, Bazin’s argument may already seem quaint to us now. We live in an era of photo-processing software and computer-generated imagery, where the authenticity of recorded audio and photographic evidence is continually toyed with or called into question. The idea of photographs, film, and video frames somehow possessing single, absolute meanings has been starkly challenged through highly politicized examples.
In 1991, Rodney King, an African American, was pulled over by Los Angeles police after leading them on a high-speed chase. Claiming that King resisted arrest, the four officers exerted excessive force—tasering King and beating him with their batons. Local resident George Holliday captured the officers’ assault on video. The tape spread around the world on the next news cycle, igniting a bonfire of latent racial tensions in Los Angeles and across the country.
For most, the twelve minutes of Holliday’s video presented clear evidence of the four white police officers using excessive force. But after a judge replacement and a venue change to the predominately white suburb of Simi Valley, in April 1992, three of the four officers were fully acquitted by a jury of thirteen whites, one Hispanic, and one Asian. The decision sparked a week of race riots in Los Angeles that left over fifty people dead and resulted in close to a billion dollars in property damage. For many, the rulings delivered an unambiguous message about the reality of racism and classism in American society: that the “reality” of the photographic image is rigged against the socially disenfranchised. The King verdict and its message about the malleability of photographic evidence fostered deep, painful community rifts and a distrust of both law enforcement and the judicial system that only continue to be compounded in our own digital moment.
The Rodney King tape is but one example of our postmodern condition. By postmodern I refer to a cultural state since World War II when simple notions of modern social progress
(everything can be explained and improved through technology, science, and logic) unraveled in the wake of the European Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Such a world view was replaced by a far more amorphous, fragmented, and relativistic experience of reality. In our postmodern, digital, and globalized culture, the sheer amount of imagery and audiovisual accounts now representing “reality”—print journalism, network and cable news, online journalism, independent documentary, viral videos, blogs, social media platforms, expert interviews, surveillance cameras, amateur video, firsthand testimony and witnessing, reenactments, fictionalized renditions, intentionally “fake” news, etc.—are so great that many argue the ontology of the photographic image has been forever compromised.
Rather than throwing up our hands and declaring the representation of reality an impossibility, we all should seize upon this as an opportunity to break out of our traditional roles as passive viewers. Instead, we can actively seek out and synthesize meaning from a range of media forms for ourselves, taking greater accountability not only in our spectatorial practices but also in how we produce and insert new imagery and media into the conversation. Since Rodney King, the frequency with which we encounter videos of excessive police force against U.S. citizens, particularly African American males, has increased exponentially. This is certainly due in part to developments in “official” recording practices—the use of bodycams as part of police protocol and the increased video surveillance of public spaces—and activists’ demands to have such material made public. But such visibility is also a result of the proliferation of audiovisual recording devices on our mobile technologies and our individual capacities to distribute such material online.
Figure 1.1 George Holliday’s amateur video captures Rodney King being beaten by police.
In July 2014, on a Staten Island street corner, it was the decision of witness Ramsey Orta to use his phone to record and then post video of Eric Garner suffocating at the hands of excessive police force that rocketed the case into real-time popular consciousness, quickly transforming his repeated refrain of “I can’t breathe” into an enduring protest call and a globally recognized #ICantBreathe hashtag. Two years later, in July 2016, the traffic stop for a broken tail light that ended in the fatal St. Paul, Minnesota police shooting of Philando Castile was not only archived to video but livestreamed to Facebook, narrated in real time by girlfriend Diamond Reynolds to the world through her phone. The ubiquity of such seemingly incriminating audiovisual material has not yet led to what most would consider to be appropriate legal justice, accountability, policy changes, or cultural shifts around systemic racism. What has indisputably changed, however, is individuals’ increased self-identification and empowerment as media producers.
In Chapter 2, we will historicize video and underscore that consumer analog camcorders were still prohibitively expensive for most in 1991, when Holliday recorded Rodney King’s beating. The power to produce the contextualizing ontology of that video was controlled by only a handful of corporate television stations and cable conglomerates. Digital-age access to the means of production and distribution has been profoundly democratized. And as we’ll revisit at the end of this chapter in our discussion of a public sphere, the current potential for our individual media acts to impact mainstream media narratives, policy debates and legislation, and broader cultural conversations is unprecedented. Notions of what a documentary should look and sound like, the sorts of issues it should address, and who can call themselves a “maker” are in a present state of flux that you can actively participate in shaping. We can also each acknowledge and never take for granted our privilege and responsibility as media producers—using whatever technologies are at our disposal to offer our own claims to reality.
Objectivity?
The notion of objectivity long associated with documentary media is a myth. Contrary to Bazin’s assertions, the camera is not an apparatus operating independently from human intervention. The choice of what to frame always means turning one’s back on something else, and the syntax of editing and sound design profoundly shape the meaning of a shot. The documentaries we often see on television—news magazine programs, nature documentaries, or historical biographies—are often termed expository documentaries (to be explored further in Chapter 2) as they are guided by a disembodied voice-of-God narrator providing exposition and supplemented with images or interview sound bites subordinate to this narration. The function of such documentaries can usually be described as informational, with rarely any further challenge, call to action, or methods of engagement suggested as the end credits roll. Most often, viewers come away with no sense of the identity of the filmmakers behind the camera or the politics governing the documentary’s creation.
Such an approach is similar to the methodology long used to write “official” accounts of history. If you think back to a history textbook from high school or even college, chances are you were supplied with a chronological order of events, neatly relating to one another through causality (A led to B and because of that C). The writing was likely a series of declarative statements, with few questions posed, and certainly never a use of the first person—the historian’s own identity obscured behind a proper, academic “voice.” There is
much that is attractive about such approaches to documentary and history. For the viewer or reader, details and events seem clear, linear, straightforward, and factual. And yet a false logic can occur: the absence of any contradiction and the invisibility of the writer or maker often lead us to confer unquestioned objectivity, truth, and facticity to the account.
In 1991, an experimental video by Japanese American filmmaker Rea Tajiri achieved the rare feat of making three distinct groups—historians, documentary practitioners, and media scholars—all come together in shared fascination of her documentary video History and Memory (1991). The video explores the rarely addressed history of internment camps on America’s west coast during World War II, where over 100,000 Japanese Americans, stripped of property, possessions, and civil liberties, were relocated and incarcerated for the duration of the war.
The U.S. government’s War Relocation Authority filmed documentary images of internment, creating newsreel films aimed at legitimizing and downplaying internment in popular consciousness. These works of propaganda, along with a series of photos by Dorothea Lange and a handful of Hollywood fiction films, have, for all intents and purposes, come to constitute the “reality” of Japanese American internment in American popular memory.
Scholar Marita Sturken warns, “The camera image produces memories, yet in offering itself as a material fragment of the past it can also produce a kind of forgetting. As such camera images can be seen as ‘screen memories’” (1). Sturken’s recruitment of screen memory references a psychoanalytic concept coined by Sigmund Freud to describe substitute memories one might construct in order to mask traumatic memories. Extending the mechanism of screen memory to media’s role in constructing popular memory in our contemporary screen culture provides compelling and disturbing double meaning to the word screen. We risk the “official” War Relocation Authority propaganda films, or Hollywood films depicting World War II and offering false closure as the end credits roll, becoming our nation’s “screen memories” of internment—remembered as a necessary wartime evil, smoothed over by a ceremonial apology in 1988 and then relegated to the history books.
In Tajiri’s case, this hole in popular memory was accompanied by a hole in her own private memory. She tells us in voice-over:
I began searching for a history—my own history. Because I had known all along that the stories I’d heard were not true and that parts had been left out. I remember having this feeling as I was growing up that I was haunted by something, that I was living within a family full of ghosts. There was this place that they knew about. I had never been there, yet I had a memory for it. I could remember a time of great sadness before I was born. We had been moved; uprooted. We had lived with a lot of pain. I had no idea where these memories came from, yet I knew the place.
How does a documentary maker represent a historical event still largely outside popular memory, or a family history comprised of fragmented stories told in snatches by various relatives, for which there are, for the most part, no documented images? In History and Memory, Tajiri gathers every image she can find:
•Hollywood films (From Here to Eternity, Bad Day at Black Rock, Yankee Doodle Dandy)
•Newsreel footage (Captain Eric Hakannson’s footage of the actual Pearl Harbor attack, captured Japanese footage taken from an airplane)
•War Department-sponsored propaganda (John Ford’s December 7th, Salinas Relocation Center footage, Office of War Information films such as Japanese Relocation).
To such “official” and popular images she adds:
•The few private photos her family has (cameras were confiscated in the camps)
•Family possessions (drawings by her uncle, a wooden bird carved by her grandmother, a box of white movie star pictures belonging to her sister, her grandparents’ camp identification cards)
•Excerpts from David Tatsuno’s Topaz Footage (1942–1945), shot by internee Tatsuno with a hidden camera during his internment years at the Topaz internment camp.
Tajiri selects this final repository of amateur footage for the private glimpses it offers into camp life. Although she is not related to Tatsuno and her own family was interned at Salinas, not Topaz, Tajiri uses these images as proxy home movies to imagine the experiences of her relatives. The resulting mix, combined with voice-overs from various relatives, her own present-day video footage revisiting the remnants of the Poston Camp, and scrolling text excerpts from a variety of official and private sources, confounds traditional separations of public and private history, calling many of the long-standing practices of historians and documentary producers into question. In each of these disciplines’ traditional forms, an unnamed writer or narrator shapes a deceptively clear, single line of events out of the infinite details. In Tajiri’s video, the infinite details and perspectives are offered to audiences at a dizzying pace in multiple, often simultaneous layers, and the guiding voice is Tajiri’s own, her personal search for a family history serving as the work’s unifying property.
Tajiri does not appear on screen during her video, with one distinct exception. She begins
Figure 1.2 Frames from History and Memory. Top, left to right: scrolling text written in screenplay format; a reenacted family image performed by Rea Tajiri; a bird carved in the camps by Tajiri’s grandmother. Bottom, left to right: a WRA image of the Santa Anita camp; one of Tajiri’s only remaining family photos from before internment; Tajiri superimposes her own question on a War Relocation Authority propaganda film.
because she was not yet born. A reenactment of this image, shot to resemble an 8mm home movie image, recurs throughout the video. Tajiri makes the compelling choice to cast herself as her mother in this reenactment (an example of what we’ll describe as a performative mode of documentary in Chapter 2), underscoring the fact that the holes in her mother’s memory and the pain that keeps her mother from talking about the camps are now also very much her own. As the video ends, she offers this conjured video image as a gift to her mother—a gift of a private memory for which there was no official recording, now visualized and shared with audiences nonetheless.
What emerges from History and Memory, and what makes its popularity endure among audiences, critics, and historians alike, is a new form of historical telling in which subjectivity is not a liability, but rather a central necessity in producing acts of countermemory that challenge both the official historical record and dominant popular memory narratives. Rather than the customary monologue, Tajiri creates a documentary space of dialogue. Instead of a singular line of cause and effect, she intentionally produces contrast, contradiction, and questioning through her edits. At one point Tajiri superimposes text over a War Relocation Authority film image asking the haunting question “Who chose what story to tell?” Tajiri favors reflexivity (also to be explored in Chapter 2) over transparency, making audiences aware of the media production process and her hand in it as we watch. She makes us understand that the meaning of a documentary doesn’t simply come from its informational content but also from its form—the particular aesthetic possibilities of time-based, audiovisual media to communicate that information in a fashion not possible via a print article, a radio podcast, or a photo essay. Instead of promising objectivity, Tajiri instead offers perspective and greater understanding, making us think for ourselves and expanding our perceptions about viable forms of documentary evidence.
Truth?
Despite the potential range in form and content, all documentaries make truth claims about our physical world and its workings. Like objectivity, however, the concept of truth is also a myth. Even seasoned audiences tend to leave some of their critical questioning and active viewing behind as soon as talking heads (referring to the typical closeup framing of head and shoulders in expository documentary interviews) with official-looking credentials displayed in a lower third (referencing the typical placement of identifying name/ occupation text chyrons in the lower third of the frame) and authoritative voices appear on the screen.
In Orson Welles’s final film F for Fake (1973), the subject matter is forgery and deception, but Welles assures us, “Everything you hear and see in the next hour will be true.” The film intertwines the antics of three real-life charlatans—the forgery painter Elmyr de Hory, the factfalsifying biographer Clifford Irving, and the life/art-blurring actress Oya Koda. Welles himself takes on the role of performer and narrator, a prestidigitator of sorts who chronicles this ride of forgery, fraud, and sleight of hand.
The documentary includes footage from three separate film endeavors that a combination of real-life coincidences and directorial flair led Welles to intertwine. Comfortably immersed in what we think is the film’s diegesis (the world of the film—all the sounds and images its characters can also see and hear; score and voice-over, for example, are nondiegetic), the shot suddenly zooms out to reveal we are watching this footage along with Welles in an editing suite as it plays on an editing flatbed. The screen of reality has in fact been framed
within another level of space and time all along. With the punch of a button, the sequence we just watched stops and rewinds as Welles inundates us with an entirely new forgery subplot twist and its associated set of “facts.”
It makes sense for a film about fakery to engage in it, and though Welles keeps his promise that everything we “see and hear in the next hour will be true,” his film is just over an hour long. But because the film is dizzying in its layers and its speed, few viewers are watching the clock, and when the film crosses the one-hour mark most don’t notice the moment when Welles is freed up from his promise. F for Fake is an entertaining romp that ultimately frames serious questions about both the mutability of evidence and the suspension of disbelief we so quickly cede when watching a documentary. The film also challenges the role of “experts,” asking us to meditate on why we permit self-appointed elites (filmmakers, critics, academics, public figures of all sorts) to sway our beliefs so heavily, allowing these same individuals to pronounce what is and is not art, what is and is not genuine, and what is and is not true.
In Confessions of a Chameleon (1987), video artist Lynn Hershman Leeson sits before the camera in talking-head closeup against nondescript backdrops and talks directly to the camera for the video’s entire twenty-two-minute duration. But the piece is far from static. Hershman begins by telling us,
So when I was small, when I was little, there would be these, uh, kinds of episodes of battering. I would go up to my attic and, uh, almost retreat into myself. And I would create these characters, each of which had their own life. Um, very completely. And sometimes it was hard to tell who was who or what the real truth of the incidents were and, uh, what was fantasy. It was always that, uh, in my situation the truth was always much more difficult to believe than anything I made up.
Already during this opening clip, the frame of the traditional documentary image begins to fragment, both formally and ontologically. A second identical, but smaller image frame of Hershman speaking begins to float across the screen. As Hershman recounts the stories of her life—going to college at the age of twelve, spending several years of her life in the hospital terribly ill, working as a call girl to support her daughter, creating a socialite persona in San Francisco who would crash parties and then steal leftover food from the trash to take home—the dates and facts she offers up begin to defy any neat chronology. The stories simply don’t seem to match up. Correspondingly, Hershman’s image multiplies on screen at times; in other moments it flips or mirrors itself. The intense candor of her confessional mode and the simple talking-head frame we so associate with documentary truth are continually undermined, in both form and content, until Hershman’s final utterance: “And I always tell the truth.”
What are we to make of Confessions of a Chameleon? If we’re to call this a documentary, what sort of truth claim (a charge substantiated by verifiable evidence) can we possibly ascribe to it? The piece is one in a series of four videos, collectively called First Person Plural, The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson (1984–1996). All are similarly confessional, and by watching them in sequence one gains a fuller picture of Hershman as someone who is incredibly intelligent and highly imaginative, who is the survivor of physical and sexual abuse, and who has a complex often painful relationship to her physical body—separating internal conceptions of self from her physical reality. She is someone who bares herself to her audiences with a rare, blunt candor while simultaneously hiding: behind her hair, her words, and the formal choices of framing and editing she employs.
And yet even without seeing other works by Hershman, some extremely powerful truth claims emerge from Confessions of a Chameleon. The title and her opening words (“ . . . in my situation the truth was always much more difficult to believe than anything I made up”) make no pretense about the fact that from an early age, Hershman fragmented her personality, blurred fantasy and reality, and donned multiple personas as a means of sheer survival. Individuals can choose for themselves which of her details to believe and which to question, but there is undoubtedly a kernel of truth in every story she tells. Any fibs or exaggerations she mixes in still testify to the fact that Hershman developed an elaborate proclivity for fantasy and screen memory as survival mechanisms against incest and abuse.
Through Confessions of a Chameleon,we must ask ourselves what place dreams, imagination, fantasy, superstition, memory, and other powerful internal, subjective states have in documentary. Fantasy and screen memory become forms of documentary evidence—legacies of trauma that directly impact Hershman’s conception of self and her interactions with others in the real, lived world. Hershman’s closing words, “And I always tell the truth,” are in essence an invective to us all to ask questions as viewers—to become active, engaged spectators who judge evidence and calibrate truth for ourselves by measures beyond the mere words, images, and speaker credentials on screen. Lynn Hershman Leeson offers her private past into the public sphere, confessing and cajoling us toward profound truths about the human condition and possible forms of documentary evidence.
Figure 1.3 Lynn Hershman Leeson fragments and refracts multiple selves in a frame from Confessions of a Chameleon
The Subject of Documentary
There is a misconception by many that to make a documentary, one must travel abroad and turn a camera onto a culture or situation not one’s own. Alternatively, many feel the characters of a documentary must be people of exceptional circumstance or renown. Certainly an openness to experience aspects of the world outside one’s daily routine or personal belief systems is essential for a documentary maker, but representing an unfamiliar or foreign realm comes with logistical and representational challenges tied to ethnography, ethics, and power that are overlooked far too often.
The “Gap” Between Subject and Maker
Traditional ethnography (the branch of anthropology attempting to investigate and derive meaning from specific human societies) long involved white, male academics traveling to other countries and describing the citizens’ ways of life through a process often couched in conceits of empirical and scientific methods. In the early twentieth century, such investigations often became increasingly conflated with eugenics—a field of “science” focused entirely on asserting the supremacy of the Caucasian race through systematic measurements of attributes such as skull and brain size across cultures and races.
In ethnographic documentary, all the way through the 1970s, members of the culture or community under scrutiny were rarely permitted to speak for themselves or with the filmmakers—interaction considered a corruption of scientific or observational methods. This often resulted in the documentary translation of different cultures and nationalities into exotic, primitive, “othered” sites, described in terms of their “lack” or difference from an assumed Western norm, all of this couched under the pretense of scientific “objectivity.”
Dead Birds (1964) is a film by Robert Gardner produced during his four-year Peabody expedition (1961–1964) studying the Dugum Dani people of western New Guinea.
A visual anthropologist and Harvard professor for forty years, Gardner’s career and film practice are still heralded by many scholars and anthropologists, while decried by others as being rife with examples of cultural bias, Anglocentrism, and perhaps most interestingly, a narrative drawn more from fictional practice than from the social sciences. The film structures its exploration of Dani culture and myth via two central figures—Weyak, a warrior, and Pua, a young boy. Weyak is depicted as strong and stoic, manning a watchtower to protect his village from neighboring marauders. Pua is painted as the runt of his neighboring village, doomed never to measure up to the social demands placed on village males.
None of the filmed material of Pua exemplifies ineptitude or evidence of such a fatalistic lot; rather, such connotations come entirely from Gardner’s voice-over. As Pua tends to his pigs outside town, Gardner’s voice narrates, “Pua by midday has already spent a number of hours watching his pigs, and concentration has begun to waver. For diversion he arms himself and sets out to kill a dragonfly. As in so many of his enterprises though, he fails.” Toward the film’s close, Gardner offers, “Pua, as he sits and watches his pigs attempt to wander, thinks how long his friend Weaké has been dead without revenge.” Pua is never permitted to speak for himself; Gardner charges simple shots of him sitting or walking with assignations of his failed character and even his internal thoughts.
The distance between Gardner and his subjects is uncomfortably large. Scholar Andrea Liss characterizes the problematic nature of such a representational encounter by writing:
Documentary’s overarching and often knowingly skeptical goals to fully apprehend its subject only fleetingly raise and then efface the possibility for empathy for the object(s) of its representation. The gap in the difference between the reality of the photographed and the photographer creates an obscenity of representation.
(xiv)
By extension, we can see that such a gap does not occur only when filming abroad. Documentaries made at home often continue to perpetuate the imbalances laid into stark relief by ethnographic film when studying the poor, racial or ethnic minorities, or any other marginalized identity or group outside the dominant cultural hegemony.
By hegemony, I refer to ideas expressed most distinctly by Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci in which the beliefs and power structures of a ruling minority are perpetuated because their validity becomes socially normalized and accepted by all beneath them. This is achieved through cultural systems of labor and leisure time, schooling, legal systems, popular media, and the myth of cultural mobility. Every person increasingly thinks only in terms of his or her own self-interest and possible ascendancy and gain rather than questioning the status quo or collectively joining in resistance against the self-appointed elite. In such a fashion, whiteness, male superiority, capitalistic opportunism, economic disparity, heterosexuality, and other power dynamics became normalized and systemic in Western society and seen as the “natural” order of life, rather than the human-made and culturally perpetuated constructs that they really are.
Countering Ethnography
Since the late 1960s, with the fall of various colonial regimes, filmmakers hailing from nonWestern cultures have begun to represent themselves and their own cultures with greater frequency. Western filmmakers have similarly turned cameras back onto their own communities and lives, rather than looking elsewhere, a practice that scholar Michael Renov has termed domestic ethnography.The notion of the “domestic” stems from the fact that these documentaries most often address familial relationships, although a sports team, sorority, political party, or any other social group to which a filmmaker claims association can function in the same manner. These documentaries permit the filmmaker a simultaneous positioning both outside of and implicated within the “other.” Such production approaches directly address Liss’s described gap between photographer and subject, at times reversing or even merging these positions in interesting ways.
Perhaps one of the most provocative examples of domestic ethnography comes from Sadie Benning, whose teenage works were shot in her bedroom on the most amateur of technologies—a Fisher-Price Pixelvision toy. Pixelvision cameras, now collectors’ items in large part because of Benning’s work, recorded black-and-white, pixilated images and sound onto audiocassette tapes. Benning’s father, filmmaker James Benning, gave his teenage daughter the toy as a Christmas gift, and locking herself in her bedroom Sadie created a fury of short videos—A New Year (1989), Me and Rubyfruit (1989), If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990), Girl Power (1992), It Wasn’t Love (1992), and others—without ever going outside.
Benning’s videos utilize highly inventive audiovisual strategies, appropriating images from television and magazines along with objects from her room to develop an intense world view and claim to reality. In her debut, A New Year, Benning clashes blaring, upbeat, grainy images of the television game show The Price Is Right with the blur of toy cars she wields to reenact her friend getting hit by a drunk driver. Panning across scrawled text on the edge of
a piece of paper with her camera, she tells us of another girl she knows “getting raped by a black man and becoming a racist Nazi skinhead.” Closing her window shutters, she writes, “Our neighbor is selling crack as my neighborhood dies.” As flurries fall around the plastic figures in a chiming snow globe, the sixteen-year-old acknowledges the craziness and reactivity of the world, her smallness in it, the fragility of life, and America’s addiction to mass consumption.
In other videos, Benning dons the personas of male movie and television heartthrobs James Dean and Luke Perry, rescuing girls and taking imagined road trips as an outlaw. Adopting the “zine” aesthetic of the early nineties (handmade magazines one compiled, photocopied, and distributed to friends), she collages television images, 1950s biology textbooks, tabloid headlines, and the rage of girl bands like Bikini Kill to offer her own outlaw narratives—lyrical, layered critiques of capitalist, heteronormative society. The claim to the real that evolves is one of an adolescent declaring her own matrix of gender identification and sexuality against the domestic backdrop of the bourgeois, white, middle-class American suburb in a time when the idea of a high school gay–straight alliance group or a similarly focused social media site or online community for teens was unfathomable.
Benning’s autobiographical domestic ethnographies look simultaneously inward and outward, utilizing performances of self to frame questions about American culture. Made with the most amateur of technologies—a mass-marketed toddler’s toy—they brought her critical acclaim across academic, art, and activist communities. Her work coincided with and further advanced an emergent queer documentary movement. Once a derogatory term, “queer” was reclaimed by scholars and activists in the 1990s as a favored term that encompassed any and all alternatives to hegemonic norms, breaking down binaries such as male/female and gay/straight that identity politics movements (feminism, gay rights) had, in many ways, only further entrenched. Benning’s works offer evidence that documentary acts produced
1.4
from It
. Sadie Benning caricatures patriotism, incorporates text, reveals and performs multiple selves, sends a toy car on a cross-country spree, directly address her audience, and appropriates and recontexualizes a gun advertisement, all without leaving her bedroom.
Figure
Frames
Wasn’t Love
1.5 Frames from Death: A Love Story. From left to right: Michelle Le Brun and Mel Howard in their home movies; Michelle turns the same camera back onto the medical gaze; Michelle backs up Mel as he presses a nurse for answers; poetic montage of angels visualizing Mel’s last words, as he sees spirits fill the hospital room.
In Death: A Love Story (1999), Michelle Le Brun reacts to her husband Mel Howard’s liver cancer diagnosis by picking up the family video camera. As Mel’s condition worsens, the couple’s increased desperation correlates with the number of alternative medicine practices they try in addition to their doctor and hospital visits. Michelle tells us, “The camera has become my saving grace. It gives me some kind of job to do in this situation.” Behind the viewfinder, Michelle gains confidence to square off against the medical gaze, asking questions of doctors and nurses. The camera becomes a companion—a catalyst for frank conversations between her and Mel about his approaching death, and a confessional for Michelle’s own fears and doubts.
The idea to turn eight months of Hi-8 videotape into a documentary came only after Mel’s death. Le Brun takes on making the documentary as a form of grief and processing. The resultant documentary is a heartfelt and instructive look at Western society’s last remaining taboo—body failure and death—offering hope that natural death, if experienced in its fullness, can be a shared, cathartic, generative process.
Certainly not every documentarian must overtly include themselves in their projects, but it would be remiss not to acknowledge the ways in which our “selves” are deeply and inescapably implicated in our work. Revealing self in some fashion—on a continuum ranging from making autobiographical work to simply including your off-screen voice asking a question to an interview subject—brings the customarily spectral presence of the filmmaker into focus for audiences. This may not fully reconcile the power imbalances Liss describes between maker and subject, but it can perhaps reflexively place such dynamics into relief, permitting audiences to assess their impact upon meaning and truth claims for themselves.
Works of domestic ethnography such as Benning’s and Le Brun’s also remind us that making powerful documentaries need not require large sums of money, special equipment, or distant travel. Access points into stories of social and political urgency surround you, waiting to be developed.
Pushing Documentary Form and Function
What limitations do we place on the forms documentary can take—how media looks and sounds, how it is exhibited, and how audiences interact with or process its content? What functions can documentary media serve in society beyond simply to inform? Scholars have long characterized documentary as a “discourse of sobriety” (Nichols 3), eliciting epistephilia—the pursuit of knowledge—rather than pleasure in audiences. While there is certainly some truth to this, we should not ignore other purposes for representing reality and
Figure
the social impacts or responses they can elicit. The examples that follow challenge both our ideas about documentary form and social function in powerful ways.
Night and Fog/Nuit et brouillard (1955), by Alain Resnais, was the first documentary to truly confront the legacies of the European Holocaust during World War II. By blending present-day images of concentration camps in ruins, filmed excerpts from the Nuremberg war crime trials, still images of Nazi atrocities, and filmed footage of the camps’ liberation with a jarring score and a voice-over composed by poet and survivor Jean Cayrol, Resnais certainly does inform audiences of the sheer breadth and depth of Nazi atrocities. But his reason for engaging audiences is not to explain the Holocaust. One could argue that “knowing” the Holocaust is itself an impossibility, defying expository documentary’s customary neatness and singular line of argument. Rather, Resnais wants to shock postwar audiences out of their complacency a decade after the war’s end. He seeks to indict—not individual perpetrators, but rather bystanders on a global scale who let genocide happen unchecked or afterward picked up where things left off, relegating the Holocaust to a historical past.
In November 1980, passersby at New York’s Lincoln Center and Los Angeles’s Century City mall might have stumbled upon life-size video screens reflecting not themselves but the sight and sound of public citizens like themselves, staring back at them via a corresponding screen on the other coast. Connected by satellite, the two live sound–image feeds were accompanied by no supplemental information, and were operational for two-hour stretches on three consecutive evenings. The brainchild of video artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Hole in Space (1980) predated the Internet, live video streaming and chat applications, and other modes of real-time communication and telepresence we now take for granted. But even now, coming upon such a two-way portal in public space would still arguably provide a unique range of sensory, spatiotemporal, social, and communicative possibilities beyond those offered up by our mobile devices. In the space of seventy-two hours, a public space oddity became a social phenomenon, with normal citizens defining the situation’s utility on their own terms. On the first evening, the experience was largely one of spectacle and curiosity as passersby stopped and engaged in sorting out the parameters of the experiment. By the second evening, with network media getting wind of the “hole” and covering it on the nightly news, the crowds grew. Many New Yorkers and Angelinos began planning “meetings” with friends and loved ones on the other coast.
If we’re to consider Hole in Space (both the live event and its preserved transcription on video now watchable decades later) as a documentary act, what was its function? It may well have informed people about the emerging possibilities of satellite and video technology, but to inform seems to fall short in describing the work’s larger function and effects. As a man and woman on opposite coasts flirt with one another, or crying relatives wave and shout updates in a virtual face-to-face, to connect seems to be a unique function of the work rarely attributed to documentary. As passersby, normally with their heads down and eyes averted, break out of their personal bubbles to stop, look, talk, and engage with complete strangers, to interrupt space and routine, to interact with technology, to collaborate with others, or to build community all become possible functions of documentary. Must the documentary act necessarily produce a linear, single-channel end product, viewed at a later date removed in time and space from the event, or can the moment of production also constitute the most powerful moment of reception: reframing reality, forming relationships, and building new, generative routes for engagement?
Also taking the experience of documentary out of the living room or theater and into the streets, artist Wendy Clarke produced hundreds of documentary segments between 1977
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Title: The Ohio Naturalist, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1901
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THE OHIO Naturalist
PUBLISHED BY
THE BIOLOGICAL CLUB OF THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
EDITORIAL STAFF
E - - —JOHN H. SCHAFFNER, A. M., M. S.
A E :
Zoology—F. L. LANDACRE, B. Sc. Botany—F. J. TYLER, B. Sc. Geology—J. A. BOWNOCKER, D. Sc. Archaeology—W. C. MILLS, B. Sc. Ornithology—R. F. GRIGGS.
A B :
PROFESSOR W. A. KELLERMAN. Ph. D. Department of Botany.
PROFESSOR HERBERT OSBORN, M. Sc. Department of Zoology.
PROFESSOR J. A. BOWNOCKER, D. Sc.
Department of Geology.
Volume I. March, 1901 Number 5
COLUMBUS, OHIO
PRESS OF HANN & ADAIR
THE OHIO NATURALIST
A journal devoted more especially to the natural history of Ohio. The official organ of T B C O S U .
Published monthly during the academic year, from November to June (8 numbers). Price 50 cents per year, payable in advance. To foreign countries, 75 cents. Single copies 10 cents.
J H. S , Editor.
F. J. T , Subscriptions.
R. F. G , Advertising Agent.
Address
THE OHIO NATURALIST, Ohio State University, COLUMBUS, OHIO.
Perennial Tumbleweeds
John H. Schaffner The Sprouting of Cocklebur Seeds
E. E. Masterman
Plant Remains from the Baum Village Site
W. C. Mills
Sprouting Flower Buds of Opuntia
F. H. Burglehaus
The Ohio Naturalist
THE BIOLOGICAL CLUB OF THE OHIO
STATE UNIVERSITY
Vol. 1. MARCH, 1901
PERENNIAL TUMBLEWEEDS.
J H. S .
Tumbleweeds may be classified under three general heads:
The annual tumbleweeds are mostly plants with a small root system which shrivels up or rots away soon after the seed has matured. The plants are then easily torn from the ground or broken off and go tumbling away before the wind. In some cases the roots become quite fleshy and brittle. In the tumble-grasses the panicle is generally the only part which is transported, the stems of the panicle being usually very brittle and breaking readily even in those forms which are easily torn up from the roots.
2. Plant of P floribunda, showing a part of the deep taproot.
The perennial tumbleweeds are especially interesting because of the way in which they are separated from the underground parts. Among the perennial forms Psoralea floribunda is one of the most typical. It is a longlived, perennial crown-former with a very deep root which may be several inches in diameter. From the short terminal stem of this root a number of aerial branches are developed annually. These branches take on a more or less globose or balloon-shaped form. At the base of each aerial stem a number of special joints are formed in which transverse cleavage regions are gradually developed, and when the seed is ripe the whole crown breaks off at these joints with remarkable ease. This is a peculiar case of the
development of a self-pruning process in the stem for a very special purpose.
Psoralea argophylla also develops perfect joints but fewer shoots usually make up the crown and it is therefore less conspicuous than P. floribunda. Psoralea esculenta is also a tumbleweed but the writer has not made an examination of the way in which it separates from the thick, tuberous, perennial root.
Psoralea floribunda is very abundant in north-central Kansas where the writer has seen great masses heaped up against hedgerows and wire fences. These plants show a most remarkable responsive adaption to an environment of very definite conditions. They have developed nearly every character possible in harmony with the dry and windy plains of the west and may be regarded as ideal prairie plants.
Fig. 3. (a) Base of a stem of P. floribunda with two cleavage joints. (b) Base of stem showing cleavage surface.
THE SPROUTING OF COCKLEBUR SEEDS.
E. E. M .
In July, 1896, Dr. E. W. Claypole, then of Buchtel College, Akron, Ohio, asked me how general was the belief that one seed of the cocklebur grew one year and the other the next year or later. Inquiry of about twenty of the older residents resulted in procuring no information touching the same. In 1897, I was told by a German farmer that one seed only grew one year and the other later, never both at the same time. A short time after I noticed the statement of A. D. Selby in Bulletin 83, (page 353) Ohio Experiment Station, as follows: “Prof. Arthur has recently shown that only one of these seeds can be caused to germinate the first year, the other always remaining until the second year.” This was a confirmation of the German’s claim, yet I determined to investigate for myself.
I carried on the experiment for three years with the following results:
In 1898, I planted 1000 burs; 917 grew two plants to the bur.
In 1899, I planted 1000 burs; 921 grew two plants to the bur.
In 1900, I planted 1000 burs; 913 grew two plants to the bur.
Total three years, 3000 burs; 2751 grew two plants to the bur.
Of the remaining 249 burs some grew one plant, some none; some had one, some had two apparently sound seeds. I regret that no further notice was taken of these seeds. The only object was to determine whether the two seeds could be made to grow at the same time. An account of the work was sent to Professor Selby, asking whether further experiment was necessary; he replied that he thought not.
Perhaps it should be added that I selected only apparently sound burs; soil was taken from a field near a creek where cockleburs grow abundantly. It was passed through a ¼ inch-mesh wire sieve, and carefully searched over with the aid of a glass. This soil was taken to a distant part of the farm; in it the seeds were planted and nature did the rest.
I also made observations as follows: I searched among specimens growing for a mile along a creek, for two plants growing together and not nearer than five inches to any other plant. Of the 1500 specimens examined each year for three years, two plants always grew from one bur.
Why have I obtained such opposite results as compared with Professor Arthur’s? Can it be referred to locality, soil, or some other more favorable conditions?
The substance of the above was presented, December 27, 1900, to the Ohio Academy of Science and it provoked a discussion in which Professors Kellerman, Schaffner, Mosely and others participated. Dr. Kellerman thought that the results of Arthur’s experiments were perhaps more nearly in accord with what usually takes place in nature. He pointed out the mistake of quoting or saying that Arthur has shown “that only one of the seeds can be caused to germinate the first year.” Turning to the printed report of the experiments in question (Proc. 16th, An. Meeting Soc. Prom. Agr. Sci., 1895), I find that, based on many experiments made previous to 1895, he gives the result in round numbers as follows: “Out of every hundred ordinarily well formed cockleburs, seventy will produce one seedling each, and five two seedlings each the first year after maturity; the remaining twenty-five will for various reasons fail to grow. Thirty of the hundred will produce seedlings the second year after maturity, five will produce seedlings the third year after maturity, and two or three seedlings will be produced in subsequent years.”
Later experiments by Dr. Arthur seemed to show a lower percentage of cases of the sprouting of both seeds to the bur in one season. In the summary he states: “The germination of both seeds of a bur of Xanthium in one season is exceptional.”
In view of the above and in accordance with the suggestions of others I purpose continuing my experiments relative to this subject.
The following interesting statement is made by Dr. Arthur, in the report cited, touching the cause of the difference in the action of the two seeds; he says it “appears to be constitutional; a hereditary character residing in the protoplasm of the embryo.”
New London, Ohio.
PLANT REMAINS FROM THE BAUM VILLAGE SITE.
W. C. M .
During the year 1900 the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society procured from the ash pits of the Baum Village Site, situated near Bournville, Ross county, Ohio, a number of grains and seeds, which were submitted to Prof. J. H. Schaffner for identification. The following is the list:
Corn, Zea mays L.
Great quantities of the eight rowed variety were found. The cobs were usually about one-half inch in diameter. Also a variety with more than eight rows, usually ten rows was found. This variety had a much thicker cob. The grains and cob were in a good state of preservation, having been charred. In several instances the charred remains of a woven fabric were found intermingled with the cobs and grains, showing that the corn had evidently been wrapped in this cloth. In other instances the grains and cobs were found in large pieces of broken pottery and were well preserved. Finding the corn in so many of the pits shows that it largely supplied the food of the camp.
Quantities of charred papaw seeds, Asimina triloba, (L.) Dunal, and the wild Hazelnut, Corylus americana Walt. were found in a number of pits showing that these were largely used for food.
Quite a quantity of the seeds of the wild red plum, Prunus americana Marsh. was also taken from the pits. These were, in a number of instances, associated with papaw seeds and the shells of the chestnut, Castanea dentata (Marsh.) Borkh.
Great quantities of the broken shells of the butternut, Juglans cinerea L. and the black walnut, Juglans nigra L. were discovered. These were usually found associated together, but in several instances they were found separated, the butternuts being more abundant than the walnuts.
Three species of hickory nuts were procured but none of these were in such quantities as the butternut and black walnut. The three species found were as follows: Hicoria minima (Marsh.) Britt., Hicoria ovata (Mill.) Britt., Hicoria laciniosa (Mx.) Britt.
Several specimens of beans, Phaseolus (sp) and also a specimen of the grape, Vitis (sp.) were found in the material, but it was not possible to tell whether the beans were one of our wild species or cultivated.
SPROUTING FLOWER BUDS OF OPUNTIA.
D . V. S .
In June of last year I took some Opuntia plants home, and also some top joints heavily set with large buds. The former were planted in the garden, the latter set in an Oleander tub. When, after a month, none of the flower buds had opened, it was thought that they were too many, as the joints bearing them were without roots, and most of them were cut off and left lying on the ground, where a part of them later on became partly or entirely covered with soil. In September, I was surprised to find them all green and fresh; most of them had rooted, and a few even sprouted, sending up shoots from half an inch to over an inch high, being perfect little joints. At the present writing (Jan. a. c.) all are alive, and, no doubt, will grow out to plants next summer. They will be watched closely and further report be given.
It might be added that the Opuntia calyx-tube, which is later the fruit, has “eyes,” that is buds, of the same character as the ordinary buds of the plant, with clusters of bristles; and out of these the young shoots grew, when the bud took root.
Evidently these buds retain more of the nature of the mother plant than is common in flowers. It is unknown to me whether similar observations have been made before. But it would be of interest to make experiments with different plants. Would the receptacles root and sprout if detached after flowering and fertilization have taken place? Would the buds sprout when left in situ on the mother plant, after the flowering parts had been removed, the receptacle only left in place? Will the buds of other genera of Cacteae, and other similar succulent plants behave in the same way, under favorable conditions?
So-called viviparous plants are, as is well known, rather common, e. g. among Gramineae, Cyperaceae, Polygoneae. But there the actual flower parts develop into leaves, from which they had originally been derived, and while yet remaining on the parent plant. New Philadelphia, Ohio.
NOTE ON THE INVOLUCRAL LEAVES OF SYNDESMON.
F. H. B .
Syndesmon thalictroides is described in Britton & Brown’s Flora as having sessile involucral leaves, which character is contradicted in the plants growing in the vicinity of Toledo. Careful observation during the past season fails to reveal a single instance of sessile involucral leaves, and most of the specimens examined have these leaves borne on petioles from one-fourth to one-half inch in length. Should like to hear from others concerning this feature of one of our most beautiful and dainty spring flowers. Toledo, Ohio.
COMPETITION IN BOTANY FOR OHIO SCHOOLS.
W. A. K .
Whatever may contribute to a more direct and real study of the plant kingdom on the part of the pupils can well be encouraged by the teacher. It is an unfortunate fact that in reference to a course in botany the notion largely prevails that it consists of lesson-work with a text-book like a course in history or algebra. It is often more dreaded than the latter because of the supposed necessity of learning a long list of difficult technical terms. Few teachers would be willing to give up the use of the text-book entirely and it is not at all necessary that they should. But every teacher can now choose a modern book of botany from the fairly long list that is offered by American publishers. These are not mainly terminology nor written with the chief aim of enabling the pupil, after having gone through a sufficient number of chapters, to “analyze” flowers. Many of them unfortunately provide no means of identifying the native plants as a part of a school course, but teachers are not left without choice of a good book after such ultra ones are thrown out of the list.
The text of an elementary book on botany should contain the important facts and principles of the science, and give a brief but comprehensive idea of the plant kingdom, in simple and plain language. An intimation and partial elucidation of means and methods employed to test or to verify the principles and inferences should be evident in the text. But this of itself is not sufficient for pedagogical purposes; there should be besides practical work provided, regular in time, ample in amount, that may train in the exercise of observation, experimentation and judgment.
I have for years devoted one-half the time of the botanical courses, both elementary and advanced, to such real work carried on partly in the laboratory, partly in the field. Besides courses here referred to others devoted wholly to laboratory, experimental or observational work are provided; but it is not my purpose to discuss these now. Neither is it necessary to give here a detailed outline of the practical work that should constitute a substantial portion of the elementary work for beginners. Those who wish to use such a simple yet ample course in the public schools can consult the “Practical Studies in Elementary Botany” published by Eldredge & Bro., Philadelphia, Pa.
But I desire to say in this connection that more real work on the native flora than is attempted even by able and enthusiastic teachers in Ohio schools would undoubtedly be advisable. I have outlined some competition work and submitted it to some of the schools looking to more interest in elementary practical work in this science. It has been urged that the project might be made more widely known to our Ohio schools with possible advantage, and therefore I have furnished, though with some misgivings, the following statement of this scheme.
Either of the following subjects may be selected: Mosses, Lichens, or Trees; the work to conform to the suggestions and directions given below. The Report of the work must be completed on or before May 15, 1901, and submitted to the Teacher of Botany, or person (or persons) designated by him, who—taking into account both the quality and quantity of the work—will forward, if worthy, the best report accompanied by the illustrative material, to the undersigned; whereupon the latter will, on or before May 31, send as a reward to the author of said report a copy of the O N V . 1.
Pupils now studying, or those who have formerly studied, botany are eligible to enter the competition. No award will be made unless at least two or three pupils undertake the work; it is hoped that every member of the class will compete.
It is desired that the pupils consult teachers, parents, and others, who may be able to advise as to the subject, kind and extent of the work, also as to the best arrangement and wording of the
report, and the labelling and preparation of the accompanying illustrative material.
The report is to contain a detailed account of the work actually done by the pupil and in no case to contain anything not his own.
The names of those entering the competition must be sent to the undersigned on or before March 30th. The suggestions, directions and explanation of the three subjects proposed are as follows:
B .—All the kinds of Mosses in the region should be collected and put under slight pressure till dry; then a small portion should be glued directly upon a piece of card-board and a larger amount placed in a paper pocket and attached to the same piece; the notes and drawings can also be attached to the same card-board which for each species should be 8¼ x 11½ inches. Most of the kinds (species) can be found in fruit; the latter is a capsule (little pod) on a slender stem called the seta. Specimens without fruit are not very satisfactory.
Tell in each case on what the specimen grows, as the ground, tree trunk, old log, rock, boulder, etc.; add other notes relating to its situation (habitat), abundance, appearance, general character (habit), etc.
Draw an enlarged figure at least of the capsule (fruit) of some or all of the species (kinds) collected. In the early stage there is usually a cap (called calyptra) on the capsule. When the capsule is ripe it opens by a lid (called the operculum) for the escape of the spores. Notice the teeth (called collectively the peristome) surrounding the mouth of the capsule—evident when the operculum falls off.
A good pocket lens must be used for this work. The drawings must be clear; after completed with a sharp lead pencil it would be well to retrace with a fine pen and india (or drawing) ink. Excessive shading of the figures is objectionable.
If a book is desired, a suitable one for beginners is Grout’s “Mosses with a Hand-lens,” price $1.10; orders sent to the author or to the writer of this article will be promptly attended to. But for the purposes of this competition the botanical names of mosses are not required; it will be of course more interesting if an attempt at the identification of the species is in all cases made.
L .—All the kinds of Lichens in the region should be collected. The little disks, or saucer-like bodies, on the plants are the fruit (called the apothecium); the apothecia are more distinct and striking in appearance, as is the whole plant also, when moist; therefore the best time to collect lichens is after a prolonged rain, or when the air is moist; when dry they are usually brittle and cannot be satisfactorily handled.
Do not save specimens that have no fruit, except in case of rare species. Only enough pressure on the specimens (placed between blotters or soft papers) should be brought into requisition as is necessary to keep them from curving or crumpling while drying. Then glue a specimen to a card-board, 8¼ × 11½ inches, and also attach a paper pocket containing ample material, and the drawings (if any are attempted), also the notes, to the same piece of cardboard. Use a separate card-board for each kind (species).
Tell the substratum on which the specimen was found—as boulders, limestone, sandstone, log or stump, fence-rail, tree or plant, soil, etc. Give additional notes as to appearance, size, abundance, habitat, habit, etc. Those growing on rocks can not generally be removed—a thin piece of rock must be chipped off to secure them.
A detailed description should be written of each kind (species); drawings perhaps might be undertaken; the different species should be compared and contrasted. Use a good pocket lens. There is no text-book on Lichens that is usable by beginners.
D .—The Trees may be studied from one of several points of view. If a camera be used, selected trees should be studied and illustrated; the bark compared in case of different species, likewise in case of one and the same species when the individuals are of different ages and sizes or grow in different situations or exposures; also modes of branching compared and shapes contrasted. Very full notes should be taken, and when written up in the report reference should be made constantly to the numbered illustrations. Few or many kinds of trees, as preferred, may be taken if this phase of the subject is selected.
Instead of the above one may study and identify all the kinds (species) of trees in the region. Full descriptions should be written out, and similarities and contrasts of different species noted. Give
uses of the kinds of woods only when such use is made in the region or the near town or city. Collect twigs and fasten them to card-boards (8¼ × 11½ inches). Attach a specimen of the fruit also when it can be found under the tree. A pamphlet (price 10 cents) with a Key to the Ohio Forest Trees by means of which the names can be determined, may be obtained from the writer.
A third method of carrying out the work on trees would be to give an account of the forest area in the region—either taking a square or rectangular tract of a mile or more in extent; or selecting if possible a natural area, as a river or creek valley, or other obviously bounded tract of ample dimensions. Draw a map of the selected region and locate thereon the forests and groups of trees. Describe them, indicating the prominent kinds of trees, the less abundant species, and the very rare ones. Tell approximately the size of the largest, the commonest size, etc. Note uses made of some of the kinds in the region or at a near manufactory. Record other observations.
MINOR PLANT NOTES, NO. 2.
W. A. K .
T E .—The Red-seeded Dandelion, now known to be common in our State, is a late bloomer. An abundance of flowers may be seen way after the severe frosts of autumn set in. Mr. Fred. J. Tyler collected specimens in bloom at Perry, Lake County, December 17. He reports “great fields” of it at that place, whereas the common Dandelion (Taraxacum taraxacum) was conspicuous by its absence. Prof. Beardslee of Cleveland, reports the Red-seeded form as the one of common occurrence in Cuyahoga County. I have noted the Red-seeded form in bloom near the city of Columbus December 23, though the month has been a cold one, the thermometer registering once 10° F. The Common Dandelion (Taraxacum taraxacum) does not seem to bloom so late in the season —at least it is in bloom much less abundantly here. Contributions of phenological observations on interesting plants of our flora by readers of T N are in this incidental way earnestly solicited.
G L B .—There are now remaining in Ohio very few large groves of beeches. Of groves of very large beeches the same may be said. At Arion, in Scioto County, in the narrow valley of Brush Creek, are a large number of magnificent specimens of this very attractive American tree. The trunks are straight as is always the case for this species, smooth, and many of them are ten to twelve feet in circumference. One specimen measured twelve feet four inches, three feet from the ground. The grove is now used for picnic and camping purposes, and it is sincerely hoped that these splendid trees may be sacredly preserved for an indefinite time.
H R C .—The manuals give the habitat of this species “in swamps and on low grounds” (Britton), “swamps and river banks” (Gray), “river banks” (Wood), and “fertile soil” (Chapman). It has been previously reported that this species was found in Ohio last November. Several specimens were found near the Ohio river in Adams county at the mouth of Brush creek, and a few were seen in Brown county. In a little ravine on Cedar creek, a tributary of Brush creek, in Adams county, fourteen miles north of the Ohio river, an enormous number of plants were growing. Some were nine to eleven inches in circumference at the base and fourteen feet high. None occurred in “swamps,” though many were in “low grounds” where the soil seemed to be fairly fertile. The majority were on rocky hillsides or quite on the top of very high ground. The annexed cut shows a specimen near the top of a rocky bluff or hill perhaps one hundred and fifty feet above the valley at Cedar Mills, Ohio. This southern Buckthorn still retained its shining leaves though my visit was late in November when nearly all the other trees except the oaks were bare. This, with the great quantities of black fruits, presented a charming spectacle. The plant is also reported in Stanley Coulter’s catalogue of Indiana plants, discovered in the southern counties by Mr. W. T. Blatchley, “growing on rocky hillsides.”
Rhamnus Caroliniana on a rocky hill.
T T ; T S .—Sometimes two trees attempt to occupy the same space at the same time. The cut above shows a red oak and a beech in close juxtaposition, neither having been able to crowd the other out, and the two are united for a short distance from the ground. This would hardly be called a natural graft perhaps, though the two are intimately united. The trees are vigorous typical specimens of the two species, growing near Brush creek, at Arion, in Scioto county, Ohio. Several other examples in the same region were noticed. Sometimes the two trees are the same species, but usually of different species, the union of tissue in all cases equally evident.
