ELECTRONIC PUBLIC SPACE
Aufderheide, Pat
ELECTRONIC Public Space BY PAT AUFDERHEIDE In the era of the Camcorder, we can all put ourselves on television—if it's our own. The challenge these days is to have something to say to a broader...
...Girls Like Us (showing July 22 on most public TV stations) excerpts moments from three years in the life of poor Philadelphia teenage girls, and gives us all-too-predictable glimpses into female poverty...
...Her work this year, A Healthy Baby Girl (June 17)—a film partly funded and distributed by Women Make Movies—links the intensely personal and the political...
...This past January, Women Make Movies' lesbian collection, including one film profiling the lesbian S/M community, triggered the outrage of Peter Hoekstra, the Republican Representative from Michigan...
...They don't offer a political project, although they often are mistaken as political (or "politically correct...
...But they do change the landscape of imagination...
...When veteran media activist Marc Weiss proposed a point-of-view documentary series in 1987, the Public Broadcasting Service rather surprisingly bought the idea...
...Now, Cambodian immigrants, gay African Americans, and Ivy League graduates all make that kind of movie...
...Or Yvonne Welbon's Remembering Wei Yi-fang, Remembering Myself, about her shifting identities as the granddaughter of a Central American immigrant, the daughter of an African American, and an expatriate in Taiwan...
...And P.O.V.'s web site (www...
...created a web-site feature where people try to understand each others' legacies of that war...
...Personal tragedy ripples out to social devastation...
...They are do-it-yourself architects of virtual and visual puj^ic space...
...For instance, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, Deborah Hoffman's wry report on her changing relationship with her Alzheimer's-afflicted mother, won an Emmy, was nominated for an Oscar, and is a best-selling video in the medical and care-giving communities...
...Their great challenge is to transcend comfortable parochialism, to stake out territory where people can discover difference within a common project of democratic culture...
...That makes distributors like Women Make Movies and others, such as California Newsreel and New Day Films, uniquely important...
...It uses its programs as an outreach strategy to organizing groups around the country...
...Dissident documentary filmmaking no longer rides a political tide...
...films have been described by conservative think-tanker Laurence Jarvik as "a sprinkling of apolitical films amidst a sea of far-left propaganda...
...market...
...This year's season features several first-time filmmakers, who seized upon the medium because, as P.O.V.'s executive producer Lisa Heller says, "they were compelled to document something going on in their communities...
...But two of P.O.V.'s strongest entries this year show how powerful documentary can be when people tell stories that make broad social connections...
...to task...
...I think we're all a little surprised that it's risen to this level of legitimacy," says Ellen Schneider, the executive director of P.O.V.'s parent body...
...managed to disprove both kinds of doomsayers...
...Some are more successful than others...
...Fourth-grade teacher Laura Simon teaches in a mostly-Latino Los Angeles school where students live in fear of Proposition 187...
...Some cynics said public TV managers, tired of a decade-long fight with independent producers, just wanted to dump out-of-format stuff into a summertime ghetto...
...P.O.V...
...There are only so many screens, and even on the verge of WebTV, only so many channels...
...The series opener, Alan Berliner's quirky portrait of his uncommunicative dad, called Nobody's Business, is altogether too easy to see as a narcissistic exercise...
...And an entire genre of lesbian filmmaking exposes and explores—often painfully, sometimes engagingly, and occasionally in ways that seem downright punishing to nonpartici-pants—hidden sexual subcultures...
...Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary (July 1) also takes a highly personal, and provocative, tone...
...Simon, herself an immigrant and a passionate opponent of 187, narrates...
...There is no nice answer...
...The world cannot change alone from within Hoover Elementary, even for one young, wonderful person like Mayra...
...It was shown last fall at Amnesty International events nationwide, and it is soon to be seen on HBO...
...It lives on the margins of mass media...
...docs that recovered buried leftwing histories and history-makers, like the films of Jim Klein and Julia Reichert...
...And so they gave us a contemporary window on American life, one you wouldn't get another way...
...These voices stake a claim to be heard...
...The personal voice cuts across categories of subject matter and theme in „ many films by Women Make Movies, often challenging invisibility or mislabeling...
...It has found its core identity, however, not in hard-hitting issue documentaries but in personal narratives that push the envelope of American pluralism...
...She introduces us to her colleagues, Latino and white, who voted on both sides—and to a fifth-grader from El Salvador named Mayra, who seems determined to succeed despite overwhelming and heartbreaking odds...
...There were documentaries of dissent and even of revolution, produced by the firebrands at Newsreel...
...In fact, P.O.V...
...She calls the camera "a moral conscience, a reminder, a witness for history, that we are not alone, this is not our [family's] problem alone...
...Exposing the reality of injustice among ethnic minorities, working people, women, and gays and lesbians once was provocative and shocking...
...It developed into a series far more popular than expected, now run by the vast majority of public TV stations...
...Not that such work is uncontroversial, especially when it touches gender...
...pbs.org/pov) acts as an open forum for dialogue...
...The explosion of subjectivity showcased by Women Make Movies's retrospective is a fascinating and sobering challenge for pluralist democracy...
...To contact P.O.V., call (212) 989-8121...
...Welbon challenges American racial and ethnic categories...
...It would be sad indeed for these projects if conservatives had not even noticed them...
...Back in the 1960s, leftwing film and video productions blossomed...
...viewers send in videotaped comments that are aired in later episodes...
...Take black British filmmaker Ngozi On-wurah's essay about her relationship with her white mother, Body Beautiful, which asks viewers to rethink what being British, or being "black," really means...
...He denounced the distributor for sponsoring a "taxpayer-funded peep show...
...P.O.V...
...To take work that had been marginalized and to plunk it into prime time with a strategy means pushing the boundaries of television...
...But only conservative paranoia could see a coherent leftwing project in the wide range of today's independent documentaries...
...Helfand's mother took the anti-miscarriage drug, DES...
...Through late spring and early summer, Women Make Movies retrospectives are showing at museums, festivals, and conferences in major cities nationwide...
...This eventually caused the filmmaker to come down with cancer, which destroyed her uterus when she was twenty-five years old...
...It has featured critical takes on traditional hot-potato topics, such as police brutality, abortion, political prisoners, and international human rights...
...To contact Women Make Movies, call (212) 925-0606...
...In 1995 on P.O.V, Judith Helfand co-produced Uprising of 1934, a powerful oral history of a Southern textile strike...
...It's also interactive on screen...
...dulgence of a film-school elite...
...In the 1960s, the personal film, in which the filmmaker searches for his or her identity on screen, was the info/ Aufderheide, a contributing editor at In These Times, teaches in the School of Communication at American University...
...P.O.V...
...These enterprises, and others like them, have attempted, over a generation, to find the time and the place for us to exchange our stories...
...The people who control them, furthermore, are used to making ridiculous amounts of money...
...Other cynics warned that P.O.V...
...These works popped up occasionally on public television, in repertory theaters, and at schools and colleges...
...Women Make Movies began as a feminist collective to train women to make film and video...
...It now is the premier distributor of films and videos by women, having helped to finish some 200 films and circulating more than 400 titles...
...The feminist filmmaking of Women Make Movies, in a range of styles, has made an impact...
...But at its best, personal-narrative documentary asks the fundamental question of who gets to tell what kind of stories...
...Now it is familiar, even caricatured (with the help of rightwing ideologues) as multicultural whining...
...Rather, it reflects the messy complexity of a rudderless political moment...
...Two organizations that are having birthday parties this summer have been major players in this real-life drama on the small and large screens: the public TV series P. O. V. is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and the feminist film distributor Women Make Movies is now twenty-five years old...
...Three decades later, dissident filmmaking is still marked by scrappy determination and permanent budgetary crisis...
...The challenge is to connect those stories with each other, to see them as part of a larger, shared story, rather than as freakish tales fit for the sleazoid talk shows...
...But there are now many more makers, who are more socially diverse and far more diffuse in their political objectives...
...documentaries about the hidden realities of class and class conflict, like those produced by Kartemquin or by Barbara Kopple...
...For instance, last year after airing a biography of Vietnam memorial designer Maya Lin, P.O.V...
...Instead, as the anniversaries of Women Make Movies and P.O.V...
...The proposition, which passed in the most recent California election but is still contested, may ban children of illegal immigrants from public school...
...Women Make Movies has received grants from the much-beset National Endowment for the Arts...
...But filmmakers quickly learned the obvious: Audio-visual space is far less expansive than print space...
...Helfand began documenting the impact of this loss on her own life, and that of her family...
...Success bred new frustration when women tried to show their work, so Women Make Movies went into distribution, not merely to get a wider audience for the films but to use them in discussion and organizing...
...Today's director Debbie Zimmerman recalls that they had to "drag high-school girls up to a film projector to prove to them they could operate it—the technology phobia was so strong...
...When she says, "My cancer is the result of a calculated business risk," it reminds us of all those people to whom DES was prescribed internationally—after it was taken off the U.S...
...But this is no neat polemic...
...They have both been instrumental in putting personal film and videomaking within a social frame, and in carving out space, electronic and physical, to encounter it...
...Calling the Ghosts, by Mandy Jacobson and Kar-men Jelcinic, charts the journey of two Bosnian women from being wartime rape victims to becoming organizers of a Hague tribunal that labeled rape a human-rights violation and a war crime...
...has also avoided the wishy-washyism that afflicts so much of public television...
...both demonstrate, the real coherence lies at the dead center of a commercial media that can't find time for the stories we urgently need to tell each other...
...Conservative ideologues have taken both Women Make Movies and P.O.V...
...would have to water down hard-hitting documentaries, opting for the more mainstream programs...
...is an experiment in television as a social space...
...The challenge these days is to have something to say to a broader community—and somewhere to say it...
Vol. 61 • July 1997 • No. 7
