So Close to Burning: Intermedia and Documentary Solo Performance in Juan and John (1965)

Abstract

When the display of documentary images attenuates solo performance, photography and other documentary media do not simply supply historical evidence; they tell stories about, interpret, and delimit horizons of interpretation, rather than “prove” it. The pageantry of archival recorded images in documentary performance supplies a silent if also resounding kind of intermedia genre that plays in relationship to the staged monologues of solo performance. In a project that aims for “forgiveness, redemption, and healing,” Roger Guenveur Smith's first explicitly autobiographical work in documentary solo performance, Juan and John, revisits the televised 22 August 1965 baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, when Juan Marichal “clashed” with John Roseboro. The projection of photographs and other media recordings throughout the performance fix Smith's meditations about the game, and the 1960s more broadly, as both fact and fiction, in a coming-of-age “memoir” that is punctuated by the rhetorical repetitions of the image. While breaking in and out of remembrance's affective repertoires offers a technique for resistance to documentary and other reinscriptions of historical violences, the serial and sequential intermedia cuts bespeak latent images of historical pasts, at once the burned and burning instruments for and bearers of memory.

Keywords:

• Intermedia
• Documentary
• Performance
• Memory
• Cultural labor

Notes

[1] While Fred Moten examines acoustic performance, and in relation to “commodities [that] speak” (In the Break 11), Hartman emphasizes the visual: “I have chosen to look elsewhere and consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned…. By defamiliarizing the familiar I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle” (4).

[2] He is not the first (see Gerlach).

[3] Marianne Hirsch asks, “If these images, in their obsessive repetition, delimit our available archive of trauma, can they enable a responsible and ethical discourse in its aftermath? How can we read them? Do they act like clichés, empty signifiers that distance and protect us from the event? Or, on the contrary, does their repetition in itself retraumatize, making distant viewers into surrogate victims who, having seen the images so often, have adopted them into their own narratives and memories, and have thus become all the more vulnerable to their effects? If they cut and wound, do they enable memory, mourning, and working through? Or is their repetition an effect of melancholic replay, appropriative identification?” (“Surviving” 5).

[4] Barthes observes that “the Photograph…represents the very subtle moment when…I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter” (14).

[5] Flood's suit was endorsed by the players' union and advised by Arthur J. Goldberg—former general counsel for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the United Steelworkers of America—who, in 1955, was a legal advisor on the merger of the American Federation of Labor with the CIO.

[6] Ever alert to fiction and fantasy, Red Smith's column closes with the quip, “Thus the commissioner restates baseball's labor policy: ‘Run along, sonny, you bother me.’”

[7] Fans recall that when Marichal made his MLB debut with the San Francisco Giants in 1960, he joined Dominicans Felipe Alou and Matty Alou, Puerto Ricans Orlando Cepeda and José Pagan, and Venezuelan Ramon Monzant. The third Alou brother, Jesús Alou, joined the Giants in 1963. Spanish was barred. The addition of global competitors to MLB rosters decentered the prospects (and the reverie of authority) for US national ballplayers.

[8] The Dodgers defeated the Giants for the National League pennant, and in October, went on to beat the Minnesota Twins to win the 1965 World Series.

[9] Smith even projects, in reverse, the footage of Trang Bang—he plays it backward as if to undo it, to move back in time to before the burning, and in so doing, make monstrous the gaze in any instance.