Roger Hallas is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University. He is the coeditor of The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture.

Reframing Bodies

AIDS, BEARING WITNESS, AND THE QUEER MOVING IMAGE By Roger Hallas

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4583-1

Contents

Illustrations……………………………………………………………………………………ixAcknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………….xiIntroduction…………………………………………………………………………………….1ONE Historical Trauma and the Performance of Talking Heads………………………………………….35TWO The Embodied Immediacy of Direct Action: Space and Movement in AIDS Video Activism…………………77THREE Related Bodies: Resisting Confession in Autobiographical AIDS Video………………………………113FOUR Queer Anachronism and the Testimonial Space of Song…………………………………………….151FIVE Gay Cinephilia and the Cherished Body of Experimental Film………………………………………185SIX Sound, Image, and the Corporeal Implication of Witnessing……………………………………….217Afterword……………………………………………………………………………………….241Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………..253Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………….291Index…………………………………………………………………………………………..307

Chapter One

Historical Trauma and the Performance of Talking Heads

Queer AIDS media abound with talking heads, that is to say, with speech acts performed before the camera and embodied by the face of the speaker. The talking head arguably constitutes the most straightforward manifestation of direct address in moving-image media. Yet queer makers have persistently subjected this long-standing device of nonfiction film and television to various kinds of transformative adaptation, playful deconstruction, and even iconoclastic violence. Let me briefly offer a few examples from several historical moments in the gay AIDS epidemic to illustrate the multiplicity of such engagements.

In Some Aspects of a Shared Lifestyle (1986), one of the earliest videos to present a sustained critique of dominant AIDS representation in the United States, Gregg Bordowitz consistently messes with the conventions of the talking head. Framed in a medium shot, he appears in several scenes in a white doctor’s coat as he reads dense medical information about AIDS at an accelerating speed. His increasingly garbled speech is gradually overridden by a woman’s voice-over reading an excerpt from Cindy Patton’s book Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS which discusses the political and cultural position from which she writes. Through this and other distortions of the talking head convention, the video exposes the ideological construction of authority and transparency in early media coverage of AIDS. In contrast to Bordowitz’s surplus of discourse, Nino Rodriguez’s seven-minute video Identities (1991) collects all the interstitial, extradiscursive moments of a conventional talking head interview with Thomas Padgett, a gay man living with AIDS. With the narrative context of his testimony completely elided, our attention can only focus on Padgett’s sighs, gulps, tears, facial twitches, and hand gestures. Rather than reduce his testimony to pure sentiment, the video reveals the ineffable psychic dimensions of trauma, which become registered through the body.

The question of the ineffable also structures Charles Lum’s Overdue Conversation (2004), a ten-minute split-screen conversation about hIv disclosure between Lum and an unnamed friend as they sit in a park cruising area. Each man is holding the camera that films the other (figure 2). Lum recalls their first sexual encounter in the park back in 1998 and reveals that he failed to mention “something” at the time. His friend replies, “Probably the same thing I didn’t tell you.” As the conversation circles around the still unnamable issue of serostatus, both men reveal and explore the continuing challenges of sexual communication between gay men in the third decade of the epidemic. In the epilogue, Lum’s friend affirms the value of their exchange: “I think four years from now we’ll probably sit and talk about that video we made four years ago and the first time that we ever mentioned to each other that we were positive.” The reciprocity of the two cameras not only facilitates the mutual disclosure between two friends but it also explicitly opens up the conversation to a public audience, since both men directly address the viewers of the video at the same time that they address each other through the camera.

Queer media makers understood the need to challenge the documentary conventions of the talking head, which are deeply implicated in the disciplinary function of dominant media representation. These conventions regulate the visible identification of specific bodies and identities, their authority to speak, and the possible forms of address they may perform. Although the talking head first emerged in early sound documentaries, such as Harry Watt’s Housing Problems (1935), and only became a documentary convention in the television era, the visual aspects of its conventions and their ideological underpinnings involve a genealogy that extends back into the nineteenth-century history of photographic portraiture. Both the photographic portrait and the talking head have played significant roles in the cultural visibility of male homosexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, providing visual forms in which the homosexual body is made to confess its pathological identity. But these visual conventions have also provided queers with valuable opportunities for self-definition, collective identity, and performative politics, as seen, for instance, in Word Is Out (1977), the Mariposa Collective’s landmark gay-liberation documentary that consists almost entirely of talking head interviews with a range of lesbians and gay men.

In this chapter, I examine four queer AIDS documentaries that explicitly use forms of performance to reframe their talking heads: Stuart Marshall’s Bright Eyes (1984), Marlon Riggs’s No Regret (Non, je ne regrette rien) (1992), Tony Ayres’s Sadness (1999), and Jack Lewis’s and Thulanie Phungula’s Sando to Samantha, aka, The Art of Dikvel (1998). The self-consciously performative elements of these documentaries provide the very means for bearing witness to the historical trauma of AIDS. Each of these videos staves off the confessional imperatives of dominant AIDS representation, specifically those bound up in the conventions of the talking head, through a different set of techniques, namely, Brechtian distantiation, performative styles of oral culture, explicit theatrical staging, and dramatic reenactment. Moreover, these performative elements contribute to the documentaries’ attempts to frame the historical trauma of AIDS through its relationship to prior historical traumas.

As the first British AIDS documentary produced by a gay man, Bright Eyes culminates, unsurprisingly, with a series of interviews with British lesbian and gay community activists, followed by a complete speech given by the American AIDS activist Michael Callen. Yet these seemingly straightforward talking heads are thoroughly contextualized by the preceding forty minutes of the video, which interrogate the historical conditions of possibility for gay public testimony about AIDS. To this end, Bright Eyes employs various forms of historical reenactment and archival investigation to situate AIDS in relation to the history of scientific photography in the nineteenth century and to the Nazi persecution of homosexuals during the Holocaust. Taking up quite different archives, No Regret, Sadness, and Sando to Samantha all frame the individual and collective trauma of AIDS for different groups of queer men of color through the optic of earlier racially defined historical trauma and their legacies, namely, U.S. slavery, Australian anti-immigrant violence, and South African apartheid. These works thus stress the need to understand not only how race and sexuality intersect in the experience of the epidemic by different constituencies of queer men around the world but also how the historical trauma of AIDS reaps its social and psychological destruction through reopening or intensifying the wounds of prior historical trauma. The incorporation of performance not only allows a representational space in which these prior historical traumas may be brought into sight but it also engenders a certain working through of trauma, both prior and ongoing. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of Matt Wolf ‘s Smalltown Boys (2003), a short experimental video that explores the intergenerational challenge of working through the loss of AIDS cultural activism itself by reframing its archive through the self-conscious performance of the mockumentary.

Although each of the documentaries discussed here employs different forms of explicit performance, they all rely on such performance to ensure that the film or video emphatically produces a testimonial address to the viewer, retaining the intersubjective potential of the moving image in the act of bearing witness. We can thus understand such use of performance as performative, in J. L. Austin’s sense. Too often, talking heads are marshaled by the discursive structure of the documentary into serving as merely another form of evidence in the rhetorical and narrative construction of an argument. Testimony subsequently loses its performative function in constituting the ethical address at the heart of the act of bearing witness and recedes into the realm of the constative, where the utterance serves only to represent the world rather than engage it. I want to distinguish my discussion of documentary performativity from the one offered by Stella Bruzzi in her influential book, New Documentary, since she is more interested in how the self-reflexive presence of the filmmaker in the “performative documentaries” of Nick Broomfield, Molly Dineen, and Michael Moore draws “attention to the impossibilities of authentic documentary representation.” She uses such films as the clearest expression of her argument that documentaries are fundamentally “a negotiation between filmmaker and reality and, at heart, a performance.” My understanding of performativity in documentary media is closer to that of Bill Nichols, despite his decision not to engage with an Austinian framework. Nichols argues that the “performative mode” emerged as a new mode of documentary in the 1980s, responding to the critique that self-reflexive documentaries were increasingly becoming formalist exercises disengaged from the social worlds they represented. Nichols writes, “Unlike reflexive documentary, performative documentary uses referentiality less as a subject of interrogation than as a component of a message directed elsewhere…. Performative documentary attempts to reorient us-affectively, subjectively-toward the historical, poetic world it brings into being.” Bright Eyes, No Regret, Sadness, and Sando to Samantha are clearly “performative documentaries” in Nichols’s sense, in that they use performance not only to politically interrogate dominant AIDS representation but also to produce the embodied knowledge of experience and memory, which provides the affective ground for the intersubjective encounter of bearing witness to AIDS.

The Talking Head in the Shadow Archive

The talking head has become a foundational practice in documentary films that bear witness to historical trauma or systematic oppression. With its nine hours of interviews with survivors, bystanders, perpetrators, and historians, as well as its deliberate absence of any archival images, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) arguably stands as the benchmark for this commitment to the power of the talking head in documentary film. There is a pervasive belief among documentary makers that testimony performed before the camera produces a more powerful effect on its viewers than any comparable strategy for presenting testimony to historical trauma. What is the power or efficacy of this particular form? Film and television studies have largely divided analysis of the talking head into considerations of its distinct practices-principally the documentary interview, television news reporting, and the talk show-rather than assess how these practices function in relation to each other in the larger “discourse space” of direct address that structures so much of contemporary audiovisual media.

In one of the earliest attempts to theorize the talking head interview and its use in documentary film, Julia Lesage defends the political aesthetics of feminist documentaries from the 1970s against the charge that they navely bought into the idea of realist transparency. She argues that feminist documentaries such as Janie’s Janie (Geri Ashur, 1971) and Union Maids (Julia Reichert and Jim Klein, 1976) drew directly from the deep structure of the consciousness-raising group, which itself had been a principal strategy of second-wave feminism. These films both record and stimulate politicized conversation among women, thus transforming conversation, an older tool of women’s subcultural resistance, into a self-conscious political act. Such testimony allows women to recognize their experiences in relation to those of other women, facilitating the emergence of a collective consciousness. But as Alexandra Juhasz has argued in the context of alternative AIDS media, this use of documentary as a political organizing tool also permits viewers to “recognize how their other loci of identity must necessarily sever them from other viewers in the room.” Rather than extinguish the political efficacy of documentary, such possibilities for disidentification in fact intensify it, opening up the difficult question of forging community across difference.

Following second-wave feminism, the political understanding of the talking head would be assumed (and expanded to incorporate the performative incitement to come out) in political documentaries of gay liberation, such as Mariposa’s Word Is Out. Although Lesage’s analysis explains the efficacy of the form in the context of feminist organizing practices at a particular historical juncture, it does not address the risk that politically committed documentarians who use the talking head must negotiate: how to avoid the confessional functions of the form? We should not forget that the convention of the talking head is as much part of hegemonic media discourse as it is of politically committed documentary. As this chapter elucidates, the talking head convention plays a significant role in the power relations constituted by documentary film and television journalism, which are themselves rooted in the disciplinary mechanisms of modern portraiture.

Allan Sekula argues that modern portraiture be understood in terms of “a double system” of representation that has functioned both honorifically and repressively. The development of photography in the nineteenth century realized that double system more fully than ever before. Photographic portraiture expanded and popularized the ceremonial presentation of the bourgeois individual, which had been the modern function of portraiture since the seventeenth century. While largely undoing the economic privilege of access to the apparatus of portraiture, photography did not dismantle portraiture as an apparatus of power: it merely allowed honorific conventions to proliferate downward in the social hierarchy. At the same time, photographic portraiture performed an increasingly vital role as a new representational technology in medical, criminological, and anthropological discourses. It functioned in such scientific contexts not to individualize but to classify and categorize. Scientists used photography to develop new physiognomic technologies, such as Francis Galton’s application of composite photography to visual pathology and Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometric system of classification for identification photographs. Sekula thus argues that “photography came to establish and delimit the terrain of the other, to define both the generalized look-the typology-and the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology” (7; emphasis original). Moreover, he insists that the double system of photographic portraiture-as ceremonial presentation and scientific categorization-should not be understood as individual and opposing traditions; rather, he contends that photography welded its honorific and repressive functions as a function of the panoptic principle of everyday life: “Every portrait implicitly took its place within a social and moral hierarchy. The private moment of sentimental individuation, the look of the frozen gaze-of-the-loved-one, was shadowed by two other more public looks: a look up, at one’s ‘betters.’ And a look down, at one’s ‘inferiors'” (10). In speaking of “a generalized, inclusive archive, a shadow archive that encompasses an entire social terrain while positioning individuals within that terrain,” Sekula delineates the semiotic interdependence between the actual physical (and seemingly separate) archives at each end of this double system (10). For instance, a photographic portrait of a criminal type shown in a nineteenth-century illustrated lecture would derive its ideological significance from its contrastive relation to the daguerreotype or carte-de-visite portraits of loved ones tucked away in the pockets of the bourgeois audience at such an event.

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Excerpted from Reframing Bodiesby Roger Hallas Copyright © 2009 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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