The Protest Movie: Medium Cool Gets Medium Hot

By Katherine Monk

VANCOUVER, May 3, 2018 — For a genre once defined by Medium Cool, it seems the protest movie is now ‘Medium Hot.’ In the wake of Donald Trump, the phrase “fake news” and the public trial of truth itself, a veritable explosion of issue-based movies has filled festival halls and programmer inboxes with passionate, often urgent, calls to action.

Hoping to follow in the same footsteps as Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, which opened the public’s eyes to climate change, just about every pressing issue now has its own ‘press corps’ of messengers and a movie to push. There is even a website dedicated to curating and disseminating such films: filmsforaction.org. Starting as a small group of film lovers and scholars with an appetite for social change a little over five years ago, the U.S.-based website now has 9,247 videos catalogued on its site, and adds more weekly.

Taking on everything from climate change to systemic racism, the rise of fascism and the fragmentation of the Middle East, a new generation of filmmaker is using the tools of documentary to get their message across in radically new ways. They are creating experimental art pieces, musical non-fiction dramas, and animated recreations. They are also following in the boot prints of modern war correspondents with “embedded” documentary, and taking all the risks that go along with it. Both to their own safety, as well as the integrity of traditional reportage.

Selina Crammond says she’s simply overwhelmed by the sheer amount of material entering the documentary arena, particularly the number of activist films being made. As Director of Programming for Vancouver’s DOXA documentary festival, she says “sheer volume is the main trend.” But there’s another thing she started to notice of late, and it was a spirit of protest permeating the work, prompting this year’s “Documentary To the Barricades!” theme.

Kicking off tonight with a screening of The Rankin File: Legacy of a Radical, a portrait of outspoken Vancouver City Councillor Harry Rankin, the festival’s theme of resistance is touched on throughout the festival catalogue of 93 titles. Most notably in a special series called “Embedded with Extremists.”

“One thing I noticed going to other festivals is the emergence of this theme of documentary filmmakers taking up the space that journalists once occupied: Journalists acting as documentary filmmakers by actually embedding themselves within extremist movements around the world,” says Crammond from her Vancouver office.

One thing I noticed going to other festivals is the emergence of this theme of documentary filmmakers taking up the space that journalists once occupied: Journalists acting as documentary filmmakers by actually embedding themselves within extremist movements around the world.

She approached author, journalist and climate change expert Geoff Dembicki to curate the program. Originally, she wanted him to do a climate change section, but they couldn’t find the right films. So given his journalistic background, she wondered if he would get Embedded. He did. In fact, Dembicki says he may have learned more about the problems facing the climate change movement watching the three films in the Embedded series than he did all the environmental submissions — though none of them deal with climate change.

All three titles in the program — Of Fathers and Sons, Golden Dawn Girls and No Man’s Land — essentially take up residence inside their subject’s circle. The first follows Talal Derki (Return to Homs) into an Al-Nusra stronghold in Syria, where he lives with a jihadist family for two years. Golden Dawn Girls is Norwegian filmmaker Havard Bustnes’s study of Neo-Nazism in modern Greece, and in No Man’s Land, David Byars takes us behind the camouflage camping gear of armed Oregon ranchers occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in early 2016.

Dembicki says the stories embedded filmmakers were telling were compelling because of how close they were getting to their subjects. “I think it’s exciting to see journalists putting themselves into the lives of their subjects. Making journalism about real people. As a student journalist, I was always on the phone in an office or on the internet. A lot of journalism is produced that way,” he says, over the phone from Seattle.

“These films seem to mark a return to an older form of journalism where you spend time with your subject and really live their life with them.” Dembicki acknowledges there are risks to being embedded, such as being used and propagating false mythology. “But these three films take place in extreme situations where traditional journalism might fail.”

“These films seem to mark a return to an older form of journalism where you spend time with your subject and really live their life with them.”

You can see the filmmakers wrestle with the inherent dilemma in each film, some ways more obvious than others. Derki and Byars are around armed men, so they have to be mindful of confrontations. They mostly bear witness without enabling, and offer editorial commentary in their long takes and choice of cut. Havard is also dealing with potentially violent types, but he pushes his female subjects in a futile bid for honesty. They resist truth every time, threatening to kick him out of the circle: “This is the last time we talk about the past.”

Getting at the elusive truth can be a strange chase, even in Dembicki’s own mind. “… When I took a closer look at these films, they provided answers to some of the questions that, in my years of climate change coverage, I’ve been dealing with and had a hard time answering,” he says.

“And the question is: Why is it that so many people reject climate change science? Why do so many people believe things that aren’t true? And I think these three films that I’ve curated in this program provide some perspective on that.”

Every film in Embedded shows us someone operating under assumptions that are not true. “Yet, they are gaining something real by doing that,” he says. Whether it’s a sense of outsider community, family, religious righteousness or the sense of finally being seen and heard by like-minded souls, there are benefits to selective processing and denial.

“When I took a closer look at these films, they provided answers to some of the questions that, in my years of climate change coverage, I’ve been dealing with and had a hard time answering. And the question is: Why is it that so many people reject climate change science? Why do so many people believe things that aren’t true? And I think these three films that I’ve curated in this program provide some perspective on that.”

Yet, the mere act of covering these deluded citizens presents a huge risk, to both the filmmaker and the viewer, because putting anything on the record makes it seem more legitimate.

Dembicki points to a scene in No Man’s Land where the protesters feel their story is losing traction with big media, so they decided to script a new angle and take it to the cameras. “All the mainstream media show up for it,” says Dembicki. “And in effect, their rejection of reality gets broadcast to millions and millions of people. And this has tangible benefits for the militiamen: After the occupation is over, a bunch of them go to trial, and nearly nobody serves time in jail and some of the leaders are even acquitted — after occupying a federal building with guns.”

Traditional journalism is failing. More to the point, “truth is failing,” says Dembicki. “I think we all assumed, for a long time, that if you gave people all the facts, they would change their mind. But in the last decade, a lot of beliefs about climate science have not budged — even though the facts are undisputed and the communication tools have become more sophisticated. So something deeper must be going on. If we can understand what that is, the more effective we can be.”

Traditional journalism is failing. More to the point, “truth is failing,” says Dembicki.

Despite the risks, “embedding” may be the only way to discover those deeper threads of willful delusion. Dembicki says after watching No Man’s Land, he understood the state of resentment that propelled Trump to office because he heard these “rebels” and “patriots” speak in their own words, tell their own story.

The law, morality, reality take a backseat to feelings — and understanding how that works in your mind is key to understanding how these people process information through a selective portal.

You have to be engaged, or make what Marshall McLuhan called a hot medium cool — take the “hot” media that plays to your emotions and consumes your senses, and “cool” it down by blurring it a little — making it low-fi and forcing your brain to synthesize the information in an active way.

You have to be engaged, or make what Marshall McLuhan called a hot medium cool — take the “hot” media that plays to your emotions and consumes your senses, and “cool” it down by blurring it a little — making it low-fi and forcing your brain to synthesize the information in an active way.

Dembicki says we’re in an era where we’re being forced to debate truth. In such times, the facts alone can’t solve a problem or bring greater understanding. We’re all being forced onto a raft of loose thoughts lashed together by ideologies and emotion. In turn, we all become embedded in our own version of truth.

No wonder programmers like Dembicki and Crammond are constantly checking in with each other, and their own internal truth meter, to navigate the new path.

“I’m conflicted,” says Crammond. “I keep going back and forth on it. Like the term ‘impact documentary’ rubs me the wrong way a bit. I don’t exactly know why, maybe it’s any film with one singular purpose of changing people’s minds. But, you know these expositional documentaries do work. I’m just thinking of my mom and dad in rural Manitoba. They just watched a film on Netflix about vegetarianism and they are both vegan now,” says Crammond, audibly stunned.

“I have been vegetarian for 15 years… yet it wasn’t until they watched this expositional so-called activist documentary that they changed their mind.”

“I’m conflicted,” says Crammond. “I keep going back and forth on it. Like the term ‘impact documentary’ rubs me the wrong way a bit. I don’t exactly know why, maybe it’s any film with one singular purpose of changing people’s minds.

WHY ACTIVIST FILMS SUCCEED

Ask self-described “agent of social change” and veteran “call to action” filmmaker Velcrow Ripper why activist documentaries have power and he points to the most human element of all: Emotion.

Though he says Metamorphosis, the new film he co-directed with his partner Nova Ami, is not a “call to action” movie — it’s still accessing the viewer’s emotional core to create a relationship with the landscape. “We are offering images… and if those images prompt a call to action for the planet, that would be great. I would love it. But that’s not what this movie is — this is a movie about transformation.”

It’s also a movie about climate change, human coping mechanisms and the act of creating art from chaos — in a real and figurative way, because Metamorphosis focuses on the place of art and artists in the bigger picture.

Both veteran filmmakers, Ami and Ripper say this is a movie about a crisis — but a crisis in slow motion. Climate collapse is ambient, but “the grief you feel for the planet is love,” they say. “And love is what transforms it. It’s not about resisting the change. We’re not against anything in this movie,” says Ami. “We made a conscious decision to be for a lot of things… to embrace the idea of metamorphosis in a positive way.”

TRANSFORMING FORM

Love and compassion is a commodity usually leveraged by drama with the aid of an orchestra, not documentary, which traditionally litigates with facts, witness testimonies and an assortment of archival footage.

In more recent years, dramatic recreations of events have also been used to great effect thanks in large part to Errol Morris’s genre-bending The Thin Blue Line (1988). Morris used recreations to demonstrate flaws in a legal argument that convicted Randall Dale Adams of first-degree murder and landed him on death row. The movie’s argument was so successful, it’s largely credited with overturning Adams’s conviction.

For the purists, Morris’s compelling recreations compromised the factual foundation of documentary by using Hollywood technique and a Philip Glass score. The film’s re-enactments “fly in the face of ‘objective’ fact-finding,” wrote The Washington Post. Adding in the very next sentence that it “earns its documentary impact with the impassioned testimony of real people involved in the case.”

One could argue the truth prevailed only as a result of dramatic prodding, and while that would seem at odds with the current idea of documentary film as an extension of hard news, it’s not at odds with what the father of “documentary” film envisioned. John Grierson, founder of what is now The National Film Board of Canada and credited originator of the term “documentary,” said he wanted truth in the raw, but he defined documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality.”

Experimentation has always been an inherent part of the genre. From its very inception as a document of moving images, to its swerve off-road into the handheld realm of cinema verité, documentary has always stood on the frontline of the cinematic revolution, ready to storm the barricades of tradition.

A HISTORY OF PROTEST

Traditional documentary film records acts of protest as they unfold before the camera — a document of events. Yet filmmakers have always been acutely aware of their limited scope: You can only point the camera in one direction. Something will always be left out.

To make more complete histories, movies have relied on the bonus of dramatic re-stagings — and a theme that proved especially attractive was the early protest movie.

Abel Gance’s Napoleon dedicated three screens to uprisings, revolts and revolution as it chronicled the French Emperor’s rise and fall. Such rebellious purpose could also be seen in the early work of Russian legend Sergei Eisenstein, from Strike and Potemkin to October: Ten Days that Shook the World.

In other cases, social issues could be explored and given human dimension through scripted drama at the hands of socially minded screenwriters, such as Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo never shied away from articulating humanist values in his life or his screenplays (Johnny Got His Gun (1971), Spartacus (1960). As one of the famed Hollywood Ten, he was eventually blacklisted and imprisoned for his creative efforts, and well as his staunch non-compliance with McCarthyism.

Film was a tool of resistance then, and it remains so now, only it has a hard time surviving in the shallow pools of Hollywood, where profit is always the priority. Outside of classic protest movies such as Norma Rae, The China Syndrome and Erin Brockovich, big-budget Hollywood films with themes of social protest — and, significantly, a strong female character — remain an exception.

The vast majority of activist movies continue to fall under the “non-fiction” banner, but every film that raises a fist to form stands in the smoky white wake of Haskell Wexler.

MEDIUM COOL

The longtime cameraman, and frequent doc shooter, was eager to turn his lens to fiction. He was given the chance to adopt a book called The Concrete Wilderness, but instead chose to put his documentary background to use and cast actors and non-actors in an original scripted drama that would use the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as the backdrop.

Wexler knew the convention was going to be confrontational. He had no idea he would forever blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction with the resulting landmark, Medium Cool. He just wanted to make a movie of the moment.

“The electricity, the excitement, the ferment, that was in the country at the time was not being reflected in anyone’s camera, and that’s what drove me from The Concrete Wilderness to Medium Cool,” he says in the 2001 documentary Look Out, Haskell It’s Real.

Wexler says the title refers to Marshall McLuhan’s notion of “hot” and “cool” media — but that was only at the suggestion of a crew member. For Wexler, capturing the mood of an uncertain time, and its uncertain truths, was paramount.

Medium Cool demanded the viewer be engaged in the act of drawing boundaries. We knew the leads were actors, we knew the protesters and the National Guardsmen in the streets were real.

Yet, the wily Wexler wanted to keep it blurry because that’s what it all felt like: the politicians were playing smoke and mirror games with the public, but it was having a real effect. Hence the iconic phrase “Look Out, Haskell! It’s Real!” It’s uttered off-screen as a can of tear gas lands at the director’s feet. The tear gas was real. The line was fake; they were shooting that scene without sound. The alarming holler was cut in afterward because Wexler wanted you to know the tear gas, the assault, actually happened. Reality marched in.

“When you are looking through the camera, in a sense you are not there, you are looking at the movie you are trying to make, and when the tear gas came at me, it was a strong enough jab from the so-called real world to remind me that edge of ground glass with the 1:85 border is no barrier to your lungs to your eyes to your face.”

“When you are looking through the camera, in a sense you are not there, you are looking at the movie you are trying to make, and when the tear gas came at me, it was a strong enough jab from the so-called real world to remind me that edge of ground glass with the 1:85 border is no barrier to your lungs to your eyes to your face.”

The film context was a bubble that allowed Wexler to distance himself, a creative safe place that he felt he had some control over. But that popped at the tip of a pointed bayonets. Suddenly, it was personal.

“…That’s why I made a film which is about a cameraman and his conscience. I am that news cameraman. I have been faced with the idea that I am a creator of images and presenter of images and I wanted those images to reflect my view of life.”

EMBEDDING AND TRADITIONAL JOURNALISTIC STANDARDS

The “personal” side of storytelling has always been embraced, but traditional journalism tries to keep things at arm’s length, to make reportage “subjective” in a bid for balance and fairness. It’s why the term “embedded” is such a nagging problem.

Shortly after the concept was introduced into the modern theatre of warfare during the occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq and neighbouring nations, the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies published a study about the impact of embedded journalism. They analyzed Dutch newspaper coverage of Afghanistan, and created the first data sets in the field.

The results were relatively conclusive: There was more coverage, but at a price. “Embedded journalism has created a diversity dilemma. While more journalists write of Afghanistan, the focus has narrowed. The close interaction between military and journalists may also jeopardize the independence of reporting.”

The dangers of embedding are clear and present. Yet, there’s a growing school of thought within journalism that embedding may be the answer to the Trump riddle: give everyone a chance to have their say — no matter what it looks like.

We need to hear each other, says Oly Colón, from the ethics group at the Poynter Institute. “Embedding might move some journalists out of their comfort zone, especially those who prefer being on the outside looking in. …[But] what if we expanded the idea of embedding journalists into other communities beyond the military? What would happen?” he writes.

“One thing that might happen is that journalists would become much more familiar with the communities in which they were embedded. They would seek out details that showed readers, listeners, viewers, and online users life like it is. They would craft stories in which the subjects would recognize themselves and the situations depicted.”

THE PLURALISM OF TRUTH

When we recognize ourselves on screen, we feel the filmmaker has captured something true. As a result, those in the enfranchised sphere of the represented tend to believe in a monolithic concept of truth, something solid and homogenous. It’s chorused and repeated by people who look, speak and think the same way — depending on the given network. Each one offers different versions of gospel truth from behind great big desks.

These days, you can tune into your own universe with its own laws of gravity. You can stand in the bomb shelter of your own belief system, or you can get outside and explore the world around you, and see — for a brief moment — through the eyes of others.

Truth looks different to everyone. So even after spending a few hours with a jihadist family in Syria, a group of female Greek nationalists, and an outlaw faction of gun-toting American activists, one comes to an important realization. The only way to approach truth in the post-truth era is to study the details of each version, and see them as the infinitely individual pixels that make up the modern portrait of the human condition.

@katherinemonk

For more information on DOXA, please visit the festival website here: www.doxafestival.ca

Main image: Local residents of Harney County face off with a ragtag group of militiamen occupying Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in David Byars No Man’s Land.

THE EX-PRESS, May 3, 2018

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