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Abstract
This essay argues that Ken Burns' epic film, The West (1996), enables a critique of viewing images as hallucination and speaks to the impossibility of representing history through images and narration via traditional documentary forms. This epistemology, in turn, enables viewers to look past the traumatic narrative that the film ostensibly presents. The film's treatment of trauma, photographs, and history makes the catharsis of guilt and moment of redemption unnecessary, thereby exonerating the viewer from potential culpability.
Notes
Daniel F. Schowalter is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey, where he teaches rhetoric and cultural criticism. Correspondence to: Daniel Schowalter, Rowan University, 311 Hawthorn Hall, 201 Mullica Hill Road, Glassboro, NJ 08028‐1701, USA. Email: [email protected]. The author wishes to acknowledge the thoughtful critiques from the anonymous reviewers as well as those from Jim Cherney, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, John Louis Lucaites, and Joan Hawkins.
The link between photographs and history (and trauma) has gained interdisciplinary attention. For a sample of recent scholarship, see: Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Judith Greenberg, ed., Trauma at Home: After 9/11 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003); Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002); Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003); Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996); Barbara Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett, “Kodak Moments, Flashbulb Memories: Reflections on 9/11,” The Drama Review 47 (2003): 11–48; John Taylor, Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe, and War (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (San Diego: Harcourt, 1996).
Linda Williams, “Mirrors Without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary,” Film Quarterly 46 (1993): 9–21.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 53.
Marianne Hirsch, “I Took Pictures: September 2001 and Beyond” in Trauma at Home: After 9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 77.
Barthes anticipates these sorts of ruminations, speaking of the photograph as self‐contradicting, as a “new” sort of hallucination because, simultaneously, it seems perceptually “flawed” but temporally accurate (115–9).
The West, prod. Ken Burns, dir. Stephen Ives, 310 min., PBS Video, 1996, videocassette. Although directed by Ives, the film is commonly attributed to Burns because it is representative of the signature style of documentary filmmaking that he popularized. This essay follows the convention.
Dee Alexander Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970).
Paul Monaco, Ribbons in Time: Movies and Society Since 1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 93.
For literature exploring this distrust, see especially, Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth‐Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Elkins, The Object Stares Back; and Dudley Andrew, ed. The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).
Diane Werts claims that the explosion of interest in Native American “histories” has television filmmakers scrambling to meet the demand and that Burns' The West was virtually guaranteed to attract an audience well into the tens of millions. See her article, “Exploring a Noble Heritage: Two Documentary Mini‐Series Shed New Light on Native American History,” Newsday 16 April 1995: 14.
Diana George, “Semi‐Documentary/Semi‐Fiction: an Examination of Genre in Strangers in Good Company,” The Journal of Film and Video 46.4 (1995): 27. Also see Judith Lancioni's compelling essay, “The Rhetoric of The Frame Revisioning Archival Photographs in The Civil War,” Western Journal of Communication 60 (1996): 397–414.
Kaja Silverman, “What is a Camera?, or: History in the Field of Vision,” Discourse 15.3 (1993): 7. She writes that color, for example, can “be understood less as an inherent attribute of the object than as an extension of the viewer's physiology, and [that the] discovery of an afterimage, which feeds directly into cinema, suggested once again that the human eye is capable of counter‐factual perception” (8).
Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: British Film Institute, 1995).
Yet, finally, as Linda Williams writes, “we exist in an era in which there is a remarkable hunger for documentary images of the real” (10). Such a hunger is evident not only in the “genocide genre” of Native American histories, but also in the undying popularity of the nationally syndicated television documentary COPS, its countless spin‐offs including Real Stories of the Highway Patrol, and NBC's verite serial, Real TV, among a host of other “reality based” television series. Not only is this type of programming enormously successful, but its cinematic style is being increasingly mimed on nationally syndicated dramatic serials like NBC's ER and Law & Order. Burns' own unprecedented and remarkable success with The Civil War, Baseball, The West, Lewis and Clark, Jazz, and Mark Twain attests to such a “hunger.”
It is interesting to note that this is the functional opposite of Barthes claim that “in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes” (53). Burns does not afford his viewers an opportunity to do this, always lingering and fixating for prolonged periods.
John Dorst, Looking West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999): 9.
The connection between self‐conscious visual discourse and the West is not a recent linkage. Dorst argues that the famous promotional photograph of Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill Cody used to advertise Buffalo Bill's Wild West is an event “positioned as the first clear moment where the textual West becomes self‐aware through the specifically visual mechanisms of staged spectacle” (29). He critiques the photograph, focusing on what he characterizes as the “thin cracks in the conventional facade the image otherwise maintains” (33). By teasing out the colonial relationships imbedded in the image, its intertextuality and iconic status, the subjects' “viewability” and visibility as well as the implications of their gazes, their potential moments of resistance, and the image's self‐reflexivity, Dorst's critique suggests that the West has always been inseparable from the complexities of spectacle.
Dorst, 106.
Carole Berger, “Viewing as Action: Film and Reader Response Criticism,” Literature‐Film Quarterly 6 (1978): 150.
Lancioni, 404.
Lancioni writes similarly of The Civil War that its “manner of presentation calls attention to itself, encouraging viewers to pay attention to the construction of the photographs and to the ways construction and reconstruction affect meaning” (401).
Baer, 6.
Lancioni, 398.
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 11.
Gene Stavis, “re Burns/PBS tv series THE WEST,” 9‐26‐96. Online posting, H‐FILM@H‐NET,MSU.EDU.
Ken Tucker, critic at large for Entertainment Weekly, claims on National Public Radio's “All Things Considered” that Burns has such a predictable form that it “seems like self parody.” 8 January 2001.
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1977), 71.
Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: The Noonday Press, 1977), 30.
Silverman, 32. She borrows this quote from the narrator of Harun Farocki's film, Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (1988), (trans., “Images of the World and the Inscription of War”).
Sontag, 15.
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 106–7.
Lancioni, 401.
Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 5.
Stuart Hall, “The Determination of News Photographs” in Manufacture of News, ed. Stanley Cohen and Jock Young (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1973), 176.
Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett, 14.
Baer, 54.
Hirsch, 72. Emphasis added.
Barthes, 110.
Carole Berger, 45–6.
Silverman notes that filmic representations of eyes are often “less seeing than seen” (18). Zelizer makes this same claim in reference to photographs of Holocaust survivors, 115
In Camera Lucida, Barthes comments on this link between the photograph and wood (15). Also, he claims that the photograph must be interrogated from the viewpoint of love and death, not pleasure (73) and that “by shifting this reality to the past … the photograph suggests that it is already dead” (79).
Baer, 137.
Baer, 60.
John Berger, About Looking, (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 39.
Berger, 39–40. Emphasis original.
Dorst, 92.
Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History: Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989), 48.
Trachtenberg, 50.
Trachtenberg, 50.
See Barthes's Camera Lucida for a more in‐depth discussion of the photograph's “pensiveness.”
Sontag, 70.
Silverman, 33. Emphasis added.
Silverman, 36.
Sontag, 124.
Silverman, 19.
Ron Burnett, Cultures of Vision (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 17.
Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 102.
Sontag, Photography, 14.
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 51.
Silverman, 33.
Lancioni, 407.
Sontag, Photography, 115.
Burnett, 46.
Trachtenberg, 49.
Carl L. Becker, “What Are Historical Facts?,” in The Philosophy of History in Our Time, ed. Hans Meyerhoff (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 126. Emphasis added.
Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 147.
Quoted in Andrea Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography, & the Holocaust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 72.
Ward Churchill, Indians Are Us? (Monroe, MA: Common Courage Press, 1994), 79. Emphasis in original.
Churchill, 81.
Hirsch, 83.
For Barthes, added color reduces authenticity; see Barthes, Camera Lucida, 81.
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 31.
Liss, 69.
Lancioni, 404.
Sontag, Photography, 76.
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 65.
Becker, 121.
James W. Carey, “A Cultural Approach to Communication” Communication 2 (1975): 15.
Silverman, 36.
Silverman, 37.
Sontag, Photography, 77.
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 77.
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 115.
John C. Tibbetts, “The Incredible Stillness of Being: Motionless Pictures in the Films of Ken Burns,” American Studies 37.1 (1996): 127. Emphasis original.
Sontag, Photography, 110.
Sontag, Photography, 116.