Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary

Author(s): Linda Williams

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Truth, History,
and the New Documentary

The August 12th, 1990 Arts and Lei- persons, and events but a manipulatedconstruction.
sure section of the New York Times carried a lead In an era of electronic and computer-generated
articlewith a ratherarrestingphotographof Franklin images, the camera, the article sensationally pro-
Roosevelt flankedby WinstonChurchillandGroucho claims, "can lie."
Marx. Standing behind them was a taut-faced Syl- In this photo, the anachronisticflattening out of
vester Stallone in his Rambo garb. The photo illus- historical referents, the trivialization of history it-
trated the major point of the accompanying article self, with the popularculture icons of Groucho and
by Andy Grundberg:that the photograph-and by Rambo rubbingup against Roosevelt and Churchill,
implicationthe moving pictureas well-is no longer, serves almost as a caricatureof the state of represen-
as Oliver Wendell Holmes once put it, a "mirrorwith tation some critics have chosen to call postmodern.
a memory" illustrating the visual truth of objects, In a key statement, Fredric Jameson has described

9
 the "cultural logic of postmodernism" as a "new official version of King's arrest. This home video
depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in might be taken to represent the other side of the
contemporary'theory' andin a whole new cultureof postmodern distrust of the image: here the camera
the image or the simulacrum"(Jameson, 1984, 58). tells the truth in a remarkable moment of cinema
To Jameson, the effect of this image culture is a v6iit6 which then becomes valuable (though not
weakening of historicity. Lamenting the loss of the conclusive) evidence in accusations against the L.A.
grand narratives of modernity, which he believes Police Department'sdiscriminatoryviolence against
once made possible the political actions of individu- minority offenders.
als representing the interests of social classes, The contradictionsare rich: on the one hand the
Jameson argues that it no longer seems possible to postmodern deluge of images seems to suggest that
represent the "real"interests of a people or a class there can be no a prioritruthof the referentto which
against the ultimate ground of social and economic the image refers; on the other hand, in this same
determinations. deluge, it is still the moving image thathas the power
While not all theorists of postmodernity are as to move audiences to a new appreciation of previ-
disturbed as Jameson by the apparent loss of the ously unknown truth.
referent, by the undecidabilities of representation In a recent book on postwar West German
accompanied by an apparentparalysis of the will to cinema andits representationsof thatcountry's past,
change, many theorists do share a sense that the Anton Kaes has written that "[T]he sheer mass of
enlightenment projects of truth and reason are de- historicalimages transmittedby today's mediaweak-
finitively over. And if representations, whether vi- ens the link between public memory and personal
sual or verbal, no longer refer to a truthor referent experience. The past is in danger of becoming a
"outthere,"as TrinhT. Minh-ha has put it, for us "in rapidly expanding collection of images, easily re-
here" (Trinh, 83), then we seem to be plunged into trievable but isolated from time and space, available
a permanent state of the self-reflexive crisis of in an eternal present by pushing a button on the
representation. What was once a "mirror with a remote control. History thus returns forever-as
memory" can now only reflect another mirror. film" (Kaes, 198). Recently, the example of history
Perhaps because so much faith was once placed that has been most insistently returning"as film" to
in the ability of the camera to reflect objective truths American viewers is the assassination of John F.
of some fundamental social referent---often con- Kennedy as simulated by film-maker Oliver Stone.
strued by the socially relevant documentary film as Stone's JFK might seem a good example of
records of injustice or exploitation of powerless Jameson's and Kaes's worst-case scenarios of the
common people-the loss of faith in the objectivity ultimate loss of historical truthamid the postmodern
of the image seems to point, nihilistically, like the hall of mirrors. While laudably obsessed with ex-
impossible memory of the meeting of the fictional posing the manifest contradictions of the Warren
Rambo and the real Roosevelt, to the brute and Commission's official version of the Kennedy as-
cynical disregard of ultimate truths. sassination, Stone's film has been severely criti-
Yet at the very same time, as any television cized for constructinga "countermyth"to the Warren
viewer and moviegoer knows, we also exist in an era Commission's explanation of what happened. In-
in which there is a remarkablehunger for documen- deed, Stone's images offer a kind of tragic counter-
tary images of the real. These images proliferate in part to the comic m61langeof the New York Times
the v6rit6 of on-the-scene cops programs in which photo of Groucho and Roosevelt. Integrating his
the camera eye merges with the eye of the law to own reconstruction of the assassination with the
observe the violence citizens do to one another. famous Zapruderfilm, whose "objective"reflection
Violence becomes the very emblem of the real in of the event is offered as the narrative (if not the
these programs. Interestingly, violent trauma has legal) clincher in Jim Garrison's argument against
become the emblem of the real in the new v6rit6 the lone assassin theory, Stone mixes Zapruder's
genre of the independent amateurvideo, which, in real v6rit6with his own simulated v6rit6to construct
the case of George Holliday's tape of the Rodney a grandiose paranoid countermyth of a vast con-
King beating by L.A. police, functioned to contra- spiracy by Lyndon Johnson, the C.I.A., andthe Joint
dict the eye of the law andto intervene in the "cops' " Chiefs of Staff to carryout a coup d'6tat. With little

10
 Interveningin
the process:JFK
(previousphoto:
The Thin Blue Line)

hard evidence to back him up, Stone would seem to film borrowing many aspects of the form of docu-
be a perfect symptom of a postmodern negativity mentary to what we might call the low-budget
andnihilism towardtruth,as if to say: "We know the postmoderndocumentaryborrowingmany features
Warren Commission made up a story, well, here's of the fiction film. My goal in what follows is to get
anothereven more dramaticand entertainingstory. beyond the much remarkedself-reflexivity andflam-
Since we can't know the truth,let's make up a grand boyant auteurism of these documentaries, which
paranoid fiction." might seem, Rashomon-like, to abandonthe pursuit
It is not my purposehere to attackOliver Stone's of truth, to what seems to me their remarkable
remarkably effective deployment of paranoia and engagement with a newer, more contingent, rela-
megalomania;the press has alreadydone a thorough tive, postmodem truth-a truth which, far from
job of debunking his unlikely fiction of a Kennedy being abandoned, still operates powerfully as the
who was about to end the Cold War and withdraw receding horizon of the documentary tradition.
from Vietnam.' What interests me however, is the When we survey the field of recent documen-
positive side of this megalomania: Stone's belief tary films two things stand out: first, their unprec-
that it is possible to intervene in the process by edented popularity among general audiences, who
which truthis constructed;his very real accomplish- now line up for documentaries as eagerly as for
ment in shaking up public perception of an official fiction films; second, their willingness to tackle
truththatclosed down, ratherthanopened up, inves- often grim, historically complex subjects. Errol
tigation; his acute awareness of how images enter Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1987), about the
into the production of knowledge. However much murderof a police officer and the near execution of
Stone may finally betraythe spiritof his own investi- the "wrong man," Michael Moore's Roger and Me
gation into the multiple, contingent, andconstructed (1989), about the dire effects of General Motors'
nature of the representationof history by asking us plant closings, and Ken Bums' 11-hour "The Civil
to believe in too tidy a conspiracy, his JFK needs to War"(1990), (watchedon PBS by 39 million Ameri-
be taken seriously for its renewal of interest in one cans) were especially popular documentaries about
of the major traumasof our country's past. uncommonly serious political and social realities.
So rather than berate Stone, I would like to Even more difficult and challenging, though not
contrast this multimillion-dollar historical fiction quite as popular,were OurHitler (Hans-Jiirgen Sy-

11
 berberg, 1980), Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), intervening in the truths known about this past.
Hotel Terminus:TheLife and TimesofKlaus Barbie Morris's film was instrumental in exonerating a
(Marcel Ophuls, 1987) and Who Killed Vincent man wrongfully accused of murder.In 1976, Dallas
Chin? (Chris Choy and Renee Tajima, 1988). And police officer Robert Wood was murdered, appar-
in 1991 the list of both critically successful and ently by a 28-year-old drifternamedRandallAdams.
popular documentary features not nominated for Like Stone's JFK, The ThinBlue Line is a film about
Academy Awards-Paris Is Burning (Jennie Liv- a November murder in Dallas. Like JFK, the film
ingston), Hearts ofDarkness:A Filmmaker'sApoca- argues that the wrong man was set up by a state
lypse (Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper), 35 Up conspiracy with an interest in convicting an easy
(Michael Apted), TruthorDare (Alex Keshishian)- scapegoat ratherthanprosecuting the real murderer.
was viewed by many as an embarrassmentto the The film-the "true"story of Randall Adams, the
Academy. Village Voice critic Amy Taubin notes man convicted of the murderof Officer Wood, and
that 1991 was a year in which four or five documen- his accuserDavid Harris,the young hitchhikerwhom
taries made it onto the Variety charts; documenta- Adams picked up the night of the murder-ends
ries now mattered in a new way (Taubin, 62). with Harris's cryptic but dramaticconfession to the
Though diverse, all the above works participate murderin a phone conversation with Errol Morris.
in a new hunger for reality on the part of a public Stylistically, The Thin Blue Line has been most
seemingly saturatedwith Hollywood fiction. Jennie remarked for its film-noirish beauty, its apparent
Livingston, director of Paris Is Burning, the re- abandonmentof cinema-v6rit6 realism for studied,
markablypopulardocumentaryabout gay drag sub- often slow-motion, andhighly expressionistic reen-
cultures in New York, notes that the out-of-touch actments of different witnesses' versions of the
documentarieshonored by the Academy all sharean murderto the tune of Philip Glass's hypnotic score.
old-fashioned earnestness toward their subjects, Like a great many recent documentaries obsessed
while the new, more populardocumentaries share a with traumaticevents of the past, The ThinBlue Line
more ironic stance toward theirs. Coincident with is self-reflexive. Like many of these new documen-
the hunger for documentary truthis the clear sense taries, it is acutely aware that the individuals whose
that this truth is subject to manipulation and con- lives are caught up in events are not so much self-
struction by docu-auteurs who, whether on camera coherent and consistent identities as they are actors
(Lanzmann in Shoah, Michael Moore in Roger and in competing narratives.As inRoger andMe, Shoah,
Me) or behind, are forcefully calling the shots.2 and, to a certain extent, Who Killed Vincent Chin?,
It is this paradoxof the intrusivemanipulationof the documentarian's role in constructing and stag-
documentarytruth,combined with a serious quest to ing these competing narrativesthus becomes para-
reveal some ultimate truths, that I would like to mount.3 In place of the self-obscuring voyeur of
isolate within a subset of the above films. What v6rit6 realism, we encounter, in these and other
interests me particularlyis the way a special few of films, a new presence in the persona of the docu-
these documentarieshandle the problem of figuring mentarian.
traumatichistorical truthsinaccessible to represen- For example, in one scene, David Harris, the
tation by any simple or single "mirror with a charming young accuser whose testimony placed
memory," and how this mirror nevertheless oper- Randall Adams on death row and who has been
ates in complicated and indirect refractions. For giving his side of the storyin alternatesections of the
while traumatic events of the past are not available film from Adams, scratcheshis head while recount-
for representation by any simple or single "mirror ing an unimportantincident from his past. In this
with a memory"-in the v6rit6 sense of capturing small gesture, Morrisdramaticallyreveals informa-
events as they happen-they do constitute a multi- tion withheld until this moment: Harris's hands are
faceted receding horizon which these films power- handcuffed. He, like Adams, is in prison. The inter-
fully evoke. views with him are now subject to reinterpretation
I would like to offer Errol Morris's The Thin since, as we soon learn, he, too, stands accused of
Blue Line as a prime example of this postmodern murder. For he has committed a senseless murder
documentary approach to the trauma of an inacces- not unlike the one he accused Adams of committing.
sible past because of its spectacular success in At this climactic moment Morris finally brings in

12
 the hard evidence against Harris previously with- present. In contrast, the man found innocent by the
held: he is a violent psychopath who invaded a film remains a cipher, we learn almost nothing of his
man's house, murderedhim, and abducted his girl- past, and this lack of knowledge appearsnecessary
friend. On top of this Morris adds the local cop's to the investigation of the official lies. What Morris
attempt to explain Harris's personal pathology; in does, in effect, is partially close down the represen-
the end we hear Harris's own near-confession-in tation of Adams' own story, the accumulation of
an audio interview-to the murderfor which Adams narratives from his past, in order to show how
has been convicted. Thus Morris captures a truth, convenienta scapegoathe was to the overdetermining
elicits a confession, in the best verit6 tradition, but pasts of all the otherfalse witnesses. Thus, instead of
only in the context of a film that is manifestly staged using fictionalizing techniques to show us the truth
and temporally manipulated by the docu-auteur. of what happened, Morris scrupulously sticks to
It would seem that in Morris's abandonmentof stylized and silent docudrama reenactments that
voyeuristic objectivity he achieves something more show only what each witness claims happened.
useful to the production of truth.His interviews get In contrast, we might consider Oliver Stone's
the interested parties talking in a special way. In a very different use of docudrama reenactments to
key statementin defense of his intrusive, self-reflex- reveal the "truth"of the existence of several assas-
ive style, Morris has attackedthe hallowed tradition sins and the plot that orchestratedtheir activity, in
of cinema verit6:"Thereis no reason why documen- the murderof JFK. Stone has Garrisonintroducethe
taries can't be as personal as fiction filmmaking and Zapruderfilm in the trial of Clay Shaw as hallowed
bear the imprintof those who made them. Truthisn't v6rit6 evidence that there had to be more than one
guaranteed by style or expression. It isn't guaran- assassin. Garrison's examination of the magic
teed by anything" (Morris, 17). bullet's trajectorydoes a fine dramaticjob of chal-
The "personal"in this statementhas been taken lenging the official version of the lone assassin. But
to refer to the personal, self-reflexive style of the in his zealous pursuit of the truthof "who dunnit,"
docu-auteur: Morris's hypnotic pace, Glass's mu- Stone matches the v6rit6 style of the Zapruderfilm
sic, the vivid colors and slow motion of the multiple with a v6rit6 simulation which, although hypoth-
reenactments. Yet the interviews too bear this per- esis, has none of the stylized, hypothetical visual
sonal imprintof the auteur.Each person who speaks marking of Morris's simulations and which there-
to the camera in The Thin Blue Line does so in a fore commandsa greatercomponentof belief. Morris,
confessional, "talking-cure"mode. James Shamus on the other hand, working in a documentary form
has pointed out that this rambling, free-associating that now eschews verit6 as a style, stylizes his
discourse ultimately collides with, and is sacrificed hypothetical reenactments and never offers any of
to, thejuridical narrativeproducingthe truthof who, them as an image of what actually happened.
finally, is guilty. And CharlesMusser also points out In the discussions surroundingthe truthclaims
that what is sacrificedis the psychological complex- of many contemporarydocumentaries,attentionhas
ity of the man the film finds innocent. Thus the film centered upon the self-reflexive challenge to once
foregoes investigation into what Adams might have hallowed techniques of verit6. It has become an
been up to thatnight taking a 16-year-old hitchhiker axiom of the new documentary that films cannot
to a drive-in movie.4 reveal the truthof events, but only the ideologies and
Morris gives us some truthsand withholds oth- consciousness thatconstructcompeting truths-the
ers. His approach to truth is altogether strategic. fictional masternarrativesby which we make sense
Truth exists for Morris because lies exist; if lies are of events. Yet too often this way of thinking has led
to be exposed, truths must be strategically deployed to a forgetting of the way in which these films still
against them. His strategy in the pursuit of this are, as Stone's film isn't, documentaries-films
relative, hierarchized, and contingent truth is thus to with a special interest in the relation to the real, the
find guilty those speakers whom he draws most "truths"which matter in people's lives but which
deeply into the explorations of their past. Harris, the cannot be transparentlyrepresented.
prosecutor Mulder, the false witness Emily Miller, One reason for this forgetting has been the
all cozy up to the camera to remember incidents erection of a too simple dichotomy between, on the
from their past which serve to indict them in the one hand, a naive faith in the truth of what the

13
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documentary image reveals-v6rit6's discredited tions under which it is possible to intervene in the
claim to capturing events while they happen-and political and cultural construction of truths which,
on the other, the embrace of fictional manipulation. while not guaranteed, nevertheless matter as the
Of course, even in its heyday no one ever fully narrativesby which we live. To better explain this
believed in an absolute truthof cinema v6rit6.There point I would like to further consider the confes-
are, moreover, many gradations of fictionalized sional, talking-cure strategy of The Thin Blue Line
manipulation ranging from the controversial ma- as it relates to Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. While I
nipulationof temporalsequence in Michael Moore's am aware of the incommensurabilityof a film about
Roger and Me to Errol Morris's scrupulous recon- the state of Texas's near-execution of an innocent
structionsof the subjectivetruthsof events as viewed man with the German state's achieved extermina-
from many different points of view. tion of six million, I want to pursue the comparison
Truth is "not guaranteed"and cannot be trans- because both films are, in very different ways,
parently reflected by a mirror with a memory, yet striking examples of postmodern documentaries
some kinds of partial and contingent truths are whose passionate desire is to intervene in the con-
nevertheless the always receding goal of the docu- struction of truths whose totality is ultimately
mentary tradition. Instead of careening between unfathomable.
idealistic faith in documentary truth and cynical In both of these films, the truth of the past is
recourse to fiction, we do betterto define documen- traumatic,violent, andunrepresentablein images. It
tarynot as an essence of truthbut as a set of strategies is obscured by official lies masking the responsibil-
designed to choose from among a horizon of relative ity of individual agents in a gross miscarriage of
and contingent truths.The advantage, and the diffi- justice. We may recall that Jameson's argument
culty, of the definition is that it holds on to the about the postmodern is that it is a loss of a sense of
concept of the real-indeed of a "real"at all---even history, of a collective or individual past, and the
in the face of tendencies to assimilate documentary knowledge of how the past determines the present:
entirely into the rules and norms of fiction. "the past as 'referent' finds itself gradually brack-
As The Thin Blue Line shows, the recognition eted, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with
that documentaryaccess to this real is strategic and nothing but texts" (Jameson, 1984, 64). That so
contingent does not require a retreatto a Rashomon many well-known and popular documentary films
universe of undecidabilities. This recognition can have taken up the task of remembering the past-
lead, rather,to a remarkableawareness of the condi- indeed thatso much populardebateaboutthe "truth"

14
 of the past has been engendered by both fiction and augment the single method of the v6rit6 camera.
documentaryfilms about the past-could therefore They seek to uncover a past the knowledge of which
be attributedto another of Jameson's points about will producenew truthsof guilt and innocence in the
the postmodern condition: the intensified nostalgia present. Randall Adams is now free at least partly
for a past that is already lost. because of the evidence of Morris's film; the Holo-
However, I would argue instead that, certainly caust comes alive not as some alien horrorforeign to
in these two films and partially in a range of others, all humanitybut as something thatis, perhapsfor the
the postmodern suspicion of over-abundantimages first time on film, understandableas an absolutely
of an unfolding, present "real" (verit6's commit- banal incrementallogic and logistics of trainsched-
ment to film "it"as "it"happens) has contributednot ules and human silence. The past events examined
to new fictionalizations but to paradoxically new in these films arenot offered as complete, totalizable,
historicizations. These historicizations are fasci- apprehensible. They are fragments, pieces of the
nated by an inaccessible, ever receding, yet newly past invoked by memory, not unitaryrepresentable
importantpast which does have depth.5History, in truths but, as Freud once referred to the psychic
Jameson's sense of traces of the past, of an absent mechanism of memory, a palimpsest, described
cause which "hurts"(Jameson, 1981, 102), would succinctly by Mary Ann Doane as "the sum total of
seem, almost by definition, to be inaccessible to the its rewritings through time." The "event" remem-
documentary form aimed at capturing action bered is never whole, never fully represented,never
vwrit6
in its unfolding. The recourse to talking-headsinter- isolated in the past alone but only accessible through
views, to people remembering the past-whether a memory which resides, as Doane has put it, "in the
the collective history of a nation or city, the personal reverberationsbetween events" (Doane, 58).
history of individuals, or the criminal event which This image of the palimpsest of memory seems
crucially determines the present-is, in these anti- a particularlyapt evocation of how these two films
v6rit6 documentaries, an attempt to overturn this approach the problem of representing the inacces-
commitment to realistically record "life as it is" in sible traumaof the past. When ErrolMorris fiction-
favor of a deeper investigation of how it became as ally reenacts the murder of Officer Wood as
it is. differently remembered by David Harris, Randall
Thus, while there is very little running after the Adams, the officer's partner, and the various wit-
action, there is considerable provocation of action. nesses who claimed to have seen the murder, he
Even though Morris and Lanzmann have certainly turns his film into a temporally elaborated palimp-
done their legwork to pursue actors in the events sest, discrediting some versions more than others
they are concerned to represent, their preferred but refusing to ever fix one as the truth.It is precisely
technique is to set up a situation in which the action Morris's refusal to fix the final truth, to go on
will come to them. In these privileged moments of seeking reverberationsand repetitions that, I argue,
v6rit6 (for there finally are moments of relative gives this film its exceptional power of truth.
the pastrepeats.We thus see the power of the This strategic and relative truth is often a by-
vwrit6)
past not simply by dramatizingit, or reenacting it, or productof other investigations into many stories of
talking about it obsessively (though these films do self-justification and reverberating memories told
all this), but finally by finding its traces, in repeti- to the camera. For example, Morris never set out to
tions and resistances, in the present. It is thus the tell the story of Randall Adams' innocence. He was
contextualization of the present with the past that is interested initially in the story of "Dr. Death," the
the most effective representationalstrategy in these psychiatrist whose testimony about the sanity of
two remarkablefilms. numerous accused murderershad resulted in a re-
Each of these documentaries digs toward an markablenumberof death sentences. It would seem
impossible archeology, picking at the scabs of lies that the more directly and singlemindedly a film
which have covered over the inaccessible originary pursues a single truth, the less chance it has of
event. The film-makers ask questions, probe cir- producing the kind of "reverberations between
cumstances, draw maps, interview historians, wit- events" that will effect meaning in the present. This
nesses, jurors, judges, police, bureaucrats, and is the problem with Roger and Me and, to stretch
survivors. These diverse investigatory processes matters, even with JFK: both go after a single target

15
 too narrowly, opposing a singular (fictionalized) events are "told with a narrative style" that omits
truthto a singular official lie. details and condenses events of a decade into a
The much publicized argumentbetween Harlan palatable "movie" (Jacobson, 22), Moore behaves
Jacobson and Michael Moore regardingthe imposi- too much like Oliver Stone, abandoning the com-
tion of a false chronology in Moore's documentary mitment to multiple contingent truths in favor of a
about the closing of General Motors' plant in Flint, unitary, paranoid view of history.
Michigan, is an example. At stake in this argument The argument between Moore and Jacobson
is whether Moore's documentationof the decline of seems to be about where documentarians should
the city of Flint in the wake of the plant closing draw the line in manipulating the historical se-
entailed an obligation to represent events in the quence of their material. But ratherthan determin-
sequence in which they actually occurred.Jacobson ing appropriatestrategies for the representationof
argues that Moore betrays his journalist/documen- the meaning of events, the argument becomes a
tarian's commitment to the objective portrayal of question of a commitment to objectivity versus a
historical fact when he implies that events that commitment to fiction. Moore says, in effect, that
occurredpriorto the major layoffs at the plant were his first commitment is to entertain and that this
the effect of these layoffs. Others have criticized entertainmentis faithful to the essence of the his-
Moore's self-promoting placement of himself at the tory. But Moore betrays the cause and effect rever-
center of the film.6 berationbetween events by this reordering.The real
In response, Moore argues that as a resident of lesson of this debate would seem to be that Moore
Flint he has a place in the film and should not attempt did not trust his audience to learn about the past in
to play the role of objective observer but of partisan any other way than through the v6rit6 capture of it.
investigator. This point is quite credible and consis- He assumed that if he didn't have footage from the
tent with the postmodern awareness that there is no historical period prior to his filming in Flint he
objective observation of truth but always an inter- couldn't show it. But the choice needn't be, as
ested participationin its construction. But when he Moore implies, between boring, laborious fact and
argues that his documentary is "in essence" true to entertainingfiction trueto the "essence," but not the
what happened to Flint in the 1980s, only that these detail, of historical events. The opposition poses a

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16
false contrastbetween a naive faith in the documen- later, in the present tense of Lanzmann's film, the
tary truthof photographicand filmic images and the elderly yet still vigorous Srebnik is surroundedon
cynical awareness of fictional manipulation. the steps of the Catholic church by an even older,
What animates Morris and Lanzmann, by con- friendly group of Poles who remembered him as a
trast, is not the opposition between absolute truth child in chains who sang by the river. They are
and absolute fiction but the awareness of the final happy he has survived and returnedto visit. But as
inaccessibility of a moment of crime, violence, Lanzmann asks them how much they knew and
trauma, irretrievably located in the past. Through understood about the fate of the Jews who were
the curiosity, ingenuity, irony, and obsessiveness of carriedaway from the church in gas vans, the group
"obtrusive"investigators, Morris and Lanzmanndo engages in a kind of free association to explain the
not so much represent this past as they reactivate it unexplainable.
in images of the present. This is their distinctive
postmodern feature as documentarians. For in re- [Lanzmann] Why do they think all this hap-
vealing the fabrications, the myths, the frequent pened to the Jews?
moments of scapegoating when easy fictional ex- [A Pole] Because they were the richest! Many
planations of trauma, violence, crime were substi- Poles were also exterminated. Even priests.
tuted for more difficult ones, these documentaries [Another Pole] Mr. Kantarowski will tell us
do not simply play off truthagainst lie, nor do they what a friend told him. It happened in Myndjewyce,
play off one fabricationagainst another;rather,they near Warsaw.
show how lies function as partial truthsto both the [Lanzmann]Go on.
agents and witnesses of history's trauma. [Mr. Kantarowski] The Jews there were gath-
For example, in one of the most discussed mo- ered in a square. The rabbi asked an SS man: "Can
ments of Shoah, Lanzmann stages a scene of home- I talk to them?" The SS man said yes. So the rabbi
coming in Chelmno, Poland, by Simon Srebnik, a said that around two thousand years ago the Jews
Polish Jew who had, as a child, worked in the death condemned the innocent Christto death. And when
camp near that town, running errandsfor the Nazis they did that, they cried out: "Let his blood fall on
and forced to sing while doing so. Now, many years our heads and on our sons' heads." The rabbi told

Shoah:Simon
Srebnikon the
churchsteps
in Chelmno

17
 them: "Perhapsthe time has come for that, so let us victims, is illuminated, the events of the past-in
do nothing, let us go, let us do as we're asked." this case the totality of the Holocaust-register not
[Lanzmann] He thinks the Jews expiated the in any fixed moment of past or present but rather,as
death of Christ? in Freud's description of the palimpsest, as the sum
[The first? Pole] He doesn't think so, or even total of its rewritings through time, not in a single
that Christ sought revenge. He didn't say that. The event but in the "reverberations"between.
rabbi said it. It was God's will, that's all! It is importantin the above example to note that
[Lanzmann, referring to an untranslated com- while cinema v6rit6 is deployed in this scene on the
ment] What'd she say? steps, as well as in the interviews throughout the
[A Polish woman] So Pilate washed his hands film, this form of v6rit6 no longer has a fetish
and said: "Christis innocent," and he sent Barabbas. function of demanding belief as the whole. In place
But the Jews cried out: "Let his blood fall on our of a truththat is "guaranteed,"the v6rit6of catching
heads!" events as they happen is here embedded in a history,
[Another Pole] That's all; now you know! placed in relationto the past, given a new power, not
(Shoah, 100).7 of absolute truthbut of repetition.
Although it is a very different sort of documen-
tary dealing with a trauma whose horrorcannot be
As critic Shoshana Felman has pointed out, this comparedto the Holocaust, ErrolMorris's The Thin
scene on the church steps in Chelmno shows the Blue Line also offers its own rich palimpsest of
Poles replacing one memory of their own witness of reverberationsbetween events. At the beginning of
the persecution of the Jews with another (false) the film, convicted murdererRandall Adams mulls
memory, an auto-mystification, produced by Mr. over the fateful events of the night of 1976 when he
Kantarowski, of the Jews' willing acceptance of ran out of gas, was picked up by David Harris,went
their persecution as scapegoats for the death of to a drive-in movie, refused to allow Harristo come
Christ. This fantasy, meant to assuage the Poles' home with him, and later found himself accused of
guilt for their complicity in the exterminationof the killing a cop with a gun that Harris had stolen. He
Jews, actually repeats the Poles' crime of the past in muses: "Why did I meet this kid? Why did I run out
the present. of gas? But it happened, it happened." The film
Felman argues that the strategy of Lanzmann's probes this "Why?" And its discovery "out of the
film is not to challenge this false testimony but to past" is not simply some fate-laden accident but,
dramatize its effects: we see Simon Srebnik sud- rather,a reverberationbetween events that reaches
denly silenced among the chatty Poles, whose vic- much furtherback into the past than that cold No-
tim he becomes all over again. Thus the film does vember night in Dallas.
not so much give us a memory as an action, here and Toward the end, after Morris has amassed a
now, of the Poles' silencing and crucifixion of great deal of evidence attesting to the false witness
Srebnik, whom they obliterate and forget even as he born by three people who testified to seeing Randall
stands in their midst (Felman, 120-128). Adams in the car with David Harris, but before
It is this repetition in the present of the crime of playing the audio tape in which Harris all but con-
the past that is key to the documentary process of fesses to the crime, the film takes a different turn
Lanzmann's film. Success, in the film's terms, is the away from the events of November and into the
ability not only to assign guilt in the past, to reveal childhood of David Harris. The film thus moves
and fix a truth of the day-to-day operation of the both forward and back in time: to events following
machinery of extermination, but also to deepen the and preceding the night of November, 1976, when
understanding of the many ways in which the Holo- the police officer was shot. Moving forward, we
caust continues to live in the present. The truth of the learn of a murder, in which David broke into the
Holocaust thus does not exist in any totalizing home of a man who had, he felt, stolen his girlfriend.
narrative, but only, as Felman notes and Lanzmann When the man defended himself, David shot him.
shows, as a collection of fragments. While the This repetition of wanton violence is the clincher in
process of scapegoating, of achieving premature the film's "case" against David. But instead of stop-
narrative closure by assigning guilt to convenient ping there, the film goes back in time as well.

18
 The Thin Blue Line:
reenactmentof the night
in November,1976

A kindly, baby-faced cop from David's home swers, "Definitely," specifying the nature of this
town, who has told us much of David's story al- bad luck: "Like I told you a while ago about the guy
ready, searches for the cause of his behavior andhits who didn't have no place to stay ... if he'd had a
upon a childhood trauma: a four-year-old brother place to stay, he'd never had no place to go, right?"
who drowned when David was only three. Morris Morris decodes this question with his own rephras-
then cuts to David speaking of this incident: "My ing, continuing to speak of Harrisin the thirdperson:
Dad was supposed to be watching us. ... I guess that "You mean if he'd stayed at the hotel that night this
might have been some kind of traumaticexperience never would have happened?" (That is, if Adams
for me. ... I guess I remindedhim ... it was hardfor had invited Harrisinto his hotel to stay with him as
me to get any acceptance from him after that. ... A Harrishad indicated earlier in the film he expected,
lot of the things I did as a young kid was an attempt then Harris would not have committed the murder
to get back at him." he later pinned on Adams.) Harris:"Good possibil-
In itself, this "getting-back-at-the-father"mo- ity, good possibility. . . . You ever hear of the
tive is something of a clich6 for explaining violent proverbial scapegoat? There probably been thou-
male behavior. But coupled as it is with the final sands of innocent people convicted ... "
"confession" scene in which Harris repeats this Morris presses: "What do you think about
getting-back-at-the-fathermotive in his relation to whether he's innocent?" Harris: "I'm sure he is."
Adams, the explanation gains resonance, exposing Morris again: "How can you be sure?"Harris:"I'm
another layer in the palimpsest of the past. As we the one who knows.... After all was said and done
watch the tape recording of this last unfilmed inter- it was pretty unbelievable. I've always thought if
view play, we hear Morris ask Harris if he thinks you could say why there's a reason that Randall
Adams is a "pretty unlucky fellow?" Harris an- Adams is in jail it might be because he didn't have

19
 a place for somebody to stay that helped him that between two entirely separate regimes of truth and
night. It might be the only reason why he's at where fiction. The choice, rather,is in strategies of fiction
he's at." for the approachto relative truths. Documentary is
Whatemerges forcefully in this near-confession not fiction and should not be conflated with it. But
is much more thanthe clinching evidence in Morris's documentarycan and should use all the strategies of
portraitof a gross miscarriage of justice. For in not fictional constructionto get at truths.What we see in
simply probing the "wrong man" story, in probing The Thin Blue Line and Shoah, and to some degree
the reverberationsbetween events of David Harris's in the other documentaries I have mentioned, is an
personal history, Morris's film discovers an under- interest in constructing truths to dispel pernicious
lying layer in the palimpsest of the past: how the fictions, even though these truths are only relative
older Randall Adams played an unwitting role in the and contingent. While never absolute and never
psychic history of the 16-year-old David Harris, a fixed, this under-construction,fragmented horizon
role which repeated an earlier trauma in Harris's of truth is one important means of combating the
life: of the father who rejected him, whose approval pernicious scapegoating fictions that can put the
he could not win, and upon whom David then wrong man on death row and enable the extermina-
revenged himself. tion of a whole people.
Harris'srevealingcomments do morethanclinch The lesson that I would like to draw from these
his guilt. Like the Poles who surround Srebnik on two exemplary postmodern documentaries is thus
the steps of the church and proclaim pity for the not at all that postmodern representationinevitably
innocent child who suffered so much even as they succumbs to a depthlessness of the simulacrum, or
repeat the crime of scapegoating Jews, so David that it gives up on truth to wallow in the undecid-
Harris proclaims the innocence of the man he has abilities of representation.The lesson, rather,is that
personally condemned, patiently explaining the pro- there can be historical depth to the notion of truth-
cess of scapegoating that the Dallas county legal not the depth of unearthing a coherent and unitary
system has so obligingly helped him accomplish. past, but the depth of the past's reverberationwith
Cinema v6rit6 in both these films is an important the present. If the authoritativemeans to the truthof
vehicle of documentary truth. We witness in the the past does not exist, if photographs and moving
present an event of simultaneous confession and images are not mirrors with memories, if they are
condemnation on the part of historical actors who more, as Baudrillard has suggested, like a hall of
repeat their crimes from the past. Individual guilt is mirrors, then our best response to this crisis of
both palpably manifest and viewed in a larger con- representationmight be to do what Lanzmann and
text of personal and social history. For even as we Morris do: to deploy the many facets of these mir-
catch David Harrisand the Poles of Chelmno in the rors to reveal the seduction of lies.
act of scapegoating innocent victims for crimes they
have not committed, these acts are revealed as part 0 Linda Williams is a member of the
of larger processes, reverberatingwith the past. editorialboardof Film Quarterly.
I think it is importantto hold on to this idea of
truth as a fragmentary shard, perhaps especially at
the moment we as a culture have begun to realize,
along with Morris, and along with the supposed
depthlessness of our postmoderncondition, thatit is Notes
not guaranteed.For some form of truthis the always
I owe thanks to Anne Friedberg, Mark Poster, Nancy Salzer,
receding goal of documentary film. But the truth MaritaSturken,Charles Musser, James Shamus, B. Ruby Rich,
figured by documentarycannotbe a simple unmask- and Marianne Hirsch for helping me, one way or another, to
ing or reflection. It is a careful construction, an formulate the ideas in this article. I also thankmy colleagues on
intervention in the politics and the semiotics of the Film Quarterly editorial board, whose friendly criticisms I
have not entirely answered.
representation.
An overly simplified dichotomy between truth
1. See, for example: JanetMaslin, "OliverStone Manipulates
and fiction is at the root of our difficulty in thinking His Puppet,"New YorkTimes (Sunday, January5, 1992),
about the truth in documentary. The choice is not p. 13; "TwistedHistory,"Newsweek (December 23, 1991),

20
 pp. 46-54; Alexander Cockburn,"J.F.K. and J.F.K.," The identity while traveling through the South, also plays off
Nation (January6-13, 1992), pp. 6-8. againstthehistoricalGeneralSherman'sdevastatingmarch.
2. Livingston's own film is an excellent example of the irony Or consider the way Ken Bums' "The Civil War" is as
she cites, not so much in her directorialattitudetowardher much about what the Civil War is to us today as it is about
subject--drag-queen ball competitions-but in her sub- the objective truth of the past.
jects' attitudes toward the construction of the illusion of 6. Laurence Jarvik, for example, argued that Moore's self-
gender. portrayal of himself as a "naive, quixotic 'rebel with a
3. In this article I will not discuss Who Killed Vincent Chin? mike"' is not an authentic image but one Moore has
or Roger and Me at much length. Although both of these promoted as a fiction (quoted in Tajima, 30).
films resemble The ThinBlue Line and Shoah in theirurge 7. I have quoted this dialogue from the published version of
to reveal truths about crimes, I do not believe these films the Shoah script but I have added the attributionof who is
succeeded as spectacularlyas Lanzmann's and Morris's in speaking in brackets. It is importantto note, however, that
respecting the complexity of these truths.In VincentChin, the script is a condensation of a prolonged scene that
the truth pursued is the racial motives animating Roger appears to be constructed out of two different interviews
Ebans, a disgruntled, unemployed auto worker who killed with Lanzmann, the Poles, and Simon Srebnik before the
Vincent Chin in a fight following a brawl in a stripjoint. church. In the first segment, Mr. Kantarowski is not
Ebans was convicted of manslaughterbut only paid a small present; in the second he is. When the old woman says "So
fine. He was then acquitted of a subsequent civil rights Pilate washed his hands ... " Mr. Kantarowskimakes the
charge that failed to convince a jury of his racial motives. gesture of washing his hands.
The film, however, convincingly pursues evidence that
Ebans' animosity towards Chin was motivated by his
anger at the Japanese for stealing jobs from Americans
(Ebans assumed Chin was Japanese).In recountingthe two Works Cited
trials, the story of the "Justicefor Vincent" Committee, and
the suffering of Vincent's mother,the film attemptsto retry Baudrillard,Jean. 1988. "Simulacraand Simulations."In Mark
the case showing evidence of Ebans' racial motives. Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings.Stanford, CA:
Film-makers Choy and Tajimagamble thattheircam- Stanford University Press.
era will capture, in interviews with Ebans, what the civil Doane, MaryAnn. 1990. "RememberingWomen: Physical and
rights case did not capture for the jury: the racist attitudes Historical Constructions in Film Theory." In E. Ann Kaplan,
that motivated the crime. They seek, in a way, what all of ed., Psychoanalysis and Cinema. New York: Routledge.
these documentaries seek: evidence of the truth of past Felman, Shoshana. 1990. "A L'Age du temoignage: Shoah de
events through their repetition in the present. This is also, Claude Lanzmann." In Au sujet de Shoah: le film de Claude
in a more satirical vein, what Michael Moore seeks when Lanzmann. Paris: Editions Belin.
he repeatedly attempts to interview the elusive Roger Grundberg, Andy. 1990. "Ask It No Questions: The Camera
Smith, head of General Motors, about the layoffs in Flint, Can Lie." New YorkTimes, Arts and Leisure. Sunday, August
Michigan: Smith's avoidance of Moore repeats this avoid- 12, pp. 1, 29.
ance of responsibility towardthe town of Flint. This is also Jacobson, Harlan. 1989. "Michael and Me." Film Comment,
what Claude Lanzmann seeks when he interviews the ex- vol. 25, no. 6 (November-December), pp. 16-26.
Nazis and witnesses of the Holocaust, and it is what Errol Jameson, Fredric, 1984. "Postmodernismor the CulturalLogic
Morris seeks when he interviews David Harris, the boy of Late Capitalism."New Left Review 146 (July-August).
who put Randall Adams on death row. Each of these films _. 1981. ThePolitical Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
succeeds in its goal to a certain extent. But the Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
singlemindedness of VincentChin's pursuitof the singular Kaes, Anton. 1989. From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of
truth of Ebans' guilt, and his culture's resentment of History as Film. Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press.
Asians, limits the film. Since Ebans never does show Lanzmann, Claude. 1985. Shoah:An Oral History of the Holo-
himself in the present to be a blatant racist, but only an caust. New York: Pantheon.
insensitive working-class guy, the film interestingly fails Lyotard, Jean-Franqois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A
on its own terms, though it is eloquent testimony to the pain Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
and suffering of the scapegoated Chin's mother. Press.
4. Shamus, Musser, and I delivered papers on The ThinBlue Morris, Errol. 1989. "TruthNot Guaranteed:An Interview with
Line at a panel devoted to the film at a conference spon- Errol Morris."Cineaste 17, pp. 16-17.
sored by New York University, "The State of Representa- Musser, Charles. 1990. Unpublished paper. "Film Truth:From
tion: Representationand the State," October 26-28, 1990. 'Kino Pravda' to Who Killed Vincent Chin? and The ThinBlue
B. Ruby Rich was a respondent. Musser's paperarguedthe Line."
point, seconded by Rich's comments, that the prosecution Shamus, James. 1990. Unpublished paper. "Optioning Time:
and the police saw Adams as a homosexual. Their eager- Writing The Thin Blue Line."
ness to prosecute Adams, ratherthan the underage Harris, Tajima, Renee. 1990. "The Perils of Popularity."The Indepen-
seems to have much to do with this perception, entirely dent (June).
suppressed by the film. Taubin, Amy. 1992. "Oscar's Docudrama."The Village Voice.
5. Consider, for example, the way Ross McElwee's Sher- March 31, p. 62.
man's March, on one level a narcissistic self-portraitof an Trinh T., Minh-ha. 1990. "DocumentaryIs/Not a Name" Octo-
eccentric Southerner's rambling attempts to discover his ber 52 (Spring), pp. 77-98.

21