A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

which provides summaries of individual news items. Tapes of news stories can be rented from the Archive. In addition to several thousand hours of evening newscasts from ABC, CBS, and NBC, the Archive includes presidential speeches (since 1970), coverage of political conventions, the Watergate hearings, and other materials]; it so happened that someone had ordered every

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item relating to Iran from three months prior to the fall of the Shah to his leaving the countrytwelve hours of one- and two-minute segments. We pounced on that. Then we ordered everything about Three Mile Island transmitted for a month after the accident. So we had four great subjects, each relating to historyeither contemporary history or past history. What we wanted to see was what modern media is doing to change our perceptions of history past or present. We found that the distortions of past history in

Roots

and

Holocaust

are almost identical to the distortions of our perception of modern events.

Anyway, we got this mass of material, and these thirty-five people broke up into four groups. We used a very open methodology, which I would like to see become part of the educational system and part of normal community activity. It has to do with analyzing and participating in the way you receive information, which is something we have to get into very, very heavily now. The theories for everything I'm doing are based on that kind of practice. I gave the group various ideas of how they could work with the material, and they added many of their own, splayed off in many directions: one would go and interview the guy who produced a show; another would count the cuts and look at various audiovisual rhythms; somebody else would look at the historical value, or analyze the text looking for hidden messages or subtexts; another would look at the advertising. The

Roots

group was the strongest. One thing we found was that the values that come out underneath this superficially rather liberal, unusual, first-time look at the institution of slavery were really worrying, and it's not that we were being communistic or hyper-radically paranoid.

MacDonald:

Can you give me an example?

Watkins:

The students immediately pounced on the fact that the only suggestions of overt rebellion on the part of the black people in the entire run of

Roots

was a single reference to the Nat Turner Rebellion: you see a body half covered in a ditch. That's the nearest you come to anyone rebelling, not only against slavery but against the values that are imposed in this series. The real message is that you must fit into the iron-cast American family values. I can't go into the whole analysis the students gave, which was brilliant, but they illustrated time after time that same message: know your place in American society.

They also noticed that when the white people were making love or kissing each other or just being romantic, the scene was always filmed like a deodorant commercial: very pristine images were used; the lovers never really did anything outrageous with each other; it was all soft focus. Now when the black people were being romantic, that was all in the dark, half hidden, and filmed in an entirely different way. When you saw naked people, you saw black people. The white ladies were always

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kind of dressed upnot the black; the producers used them to provide sexual titillation. But the values about knowing your place and conforming, the celluloid was dripping with that.

I also talked with them about cutting rhythms and production decisions. I asked them to really look at the role of actors, and at the pat narrative structure, with the violins playing and the guy coming back home after twenty years away from his slave family and the tears, the synthetic tears, rolling down the faces of the black ladies. It's puke-making. I really can't look at a narrative film anymorenot one with these traditional rhythms going on. The manipulation is so obvious and so patent. I got the students to think about what these rhythms might be doing in terms of their perception of history, their perception of themselves, and their sensitivity to the black and white issue.

We didn't meet Alex Haley, but we met his counterpart in

Holocaust,

Gerald Green. He came along and spoke; we were lucky to get him. Everything I've said about

Roots

you could say about

Holocaust

. The people who make these shows are so proud of their research, but when you start to press them about it, they back off immediately and say, "Well, you know, we're not doing documentary; we're making a show; we're making drama; we never pretend that we're being historians." But they do! The Learning Corporation of America, the distributor of

Holocaust,

is constantly saying in the blurbs that this

is

reality, this

is