An Other Documentary Is Possible: Indy Solidarity Video and Aesthetic Politics

Abstract

Some time ago, film scholar Jane Gaines wondered what “moves viewers … to do something instead of nothing in relation to the political situation illustrated on the screen” (1999, 89). Is what moves an audience created by the film’s argument or through its visceral effect and bodily reaction? Gaines suggested that “political mimicry,” that is, an audience’s offscreen continuation of the struggle depicted on screen, “has to do with the production of affect in and through the conventionalized imagery of struggle: bloodied bodies, marching throngs, angry police. But clearly such imagery will have no resonance without politics, the politics that has been theorized as consciousness … ” (92). Gaines draws attention to the way political documentary uses form and argument together to create a film’s impact on its audience, noting that this impact will be most effective if the audience is not neutral, not an objective observer, but rather already involved in creating social change. The political documentary in this sense appears as intimately related to activism as profilmic and postfilmic events, while at the same time such a documentary itself constitutes a politically creative intervention.

Field research for this essay was made possible by a generous research grant from the Regents of the University of California. Evolving versions of it were presented in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Ohio State University (February 5, 2011); at the Ethnicity, Media and Transnationalization Conference at the University of Southern California (November 17–18, 2011); at the conference workshop Dislocating Cultures at Rice University (December 7, 2012); and most recently in the meeting of UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society Winter 2013 Resident Fellowship Group “Materializing the Americas.” I would particularly like to thank JasonWeems and Jessica Orzulak for carefully reading a draft of this essay and offering valuable suggestions for organizing the argument in a less convoluted manner. Thanks as well to the editors of this volume for their detailed and constructive comments.