Documentary Can Reveal an America Hiding in Plain Sight

“Documentary hails its viewers. In the words of Louis Althusser, it interpellates us, bringing us into the world we can see on screen, one often invisible, forgotten, left out of the picture.” Paula Rabinowitz, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Minnesota and  editor-in-chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature weighs in the power of documentary film.

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If you were an aspiring socialist-feminist activist during the 1970s, Julia Reichert’s films, Growing Up Female (1971) and Union Maids (1976), provided manuals for how and also how-not to live your life as a militant radical unfettered by the dominant view of womanhood. They became required viewing in the women’s studies classes you taught in the 1980s. Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists was your guide to a dissertation on “Female Subjectivity in Women’s Revolutionary Novels of the 1930s.”¹ So, as a socialist-feminist scholar in the 1990s, you wrote a book on “the politics of documentary,” because you knew from experience that political documentaries changed people’s minds and led to action.²

These films exerted power—over the filmmakers who made them and the audiences who watched them, often in the company of others, sisters and comrades in struggle, organizing for a better world. Films about workers, women, racialized minorities struggling to resist constraints on their lives within oppressive institutions—family, healthcare, industry, government—encountered every day at home, factories, clinics, and even picket lines. For fifty years, Reichert and her collaborators have been delving into their Midwestern community—factory towns and small cities in Ohio, that bellwether state—to look at America; to discern the impact of plant closures, misguided policies, and movements.

In Growing Up Female (1971), Reichert asks Tammy—the “hip woman chickie,” as the adman calls those to whom commercials sell “freedom”—what she’d like to do right now. Tammy answers she wishes she were in bed with her boyfriend. Liberation? Perhaps… Later, Laura Nyro belts out, “Bill, I love you so, I always will… Come on and marry me, Bill.” That’s what being female will get you—maybe.

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  Julia Reichert’s Growing Up Female, 1971. Image courtesy the artist
  
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  Julia Reichert’s Growing Up Female, 1971. Image courtesy the artist
  
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  Julia Reichert’s Growing Up Female, 1971. Image courtesy the artist
  

In the astonishing black-and-white Methadone: An American Way of Dealing (1974), drugs and so-called drug rehabilitation come under scrutiny through the filmmakers’ distinctive use of standard documentary techniques: archival footage, observational scenes, informational titles and interviews. During extreme close-ups, Reichert’s

velvety, quizzical, usually off-camera voice asks prying questions. Their method demonstrates how documentary produces and projects intimacy. As Methadone probes the lives of heroin users and the government agents overseeing them, an understanding between filmmakers and subjects moves the audience into deeper levels of awareness, and self-awareness, of an America hiding in plain sight, where collective action exerts a powerful force—love—on those who resist social control together.

Documentary hails its viewers. In the words of Louis Althusser, it interpellates us, bringing us into the world we can see on screen, one often invisible, forgotten, left out of the picture. In a recent New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof and Shirley WuDunn ask, “Who Killed the Knapp Family?” Their probing investigation of the multiple drug-related deaths of Kristof’s boyhood friends from Yamhill, Oregon, and the ways in which fifty years of economic and political decisions favoring corporations have devastated a family, appeared the same day the newspaper’s Sabrina Tavernise reported on Portsmouth, Ohio, as a “symbol of the opioid crisis.” Had these three journalists been watching Julia Reichert’s career unfold, some answers about what has been happening in America during the past half century would have been obvious: communities destroyed by greed, cynicism, and neglect; and more important, ordinary people pushing against these soul-killing forces with grace and dignity, individually and collectively (like Sylvia Woods in both Union Maids and Seeing Red). In Reichert’s films, the faces and voices of Midwesterners—working people, poor people, sick people and their families—enter into our consciousness, compelling remorse, outrage, and amazement, propelling us out of our seats and into the streets. As Bill Bailey says in Seeing Red: “You must be dead, you ain’t moving.”

Footnotes

¹ This became Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
² For an extended analysis of how documentaries call up and reinforce a committed audience, see They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (London: Verso Books, 1994).

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