Introduction by Jordan Lord

The show isn’t finished yet. Two of the videos I’ve just started on. The other one I only finished editing this week. I’m telling you this, less as an apology or an excuse, and more to think about how it changes the work you might find here.

In many ways, this show was prompted by seeing Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s film The Viewing Booth. The film largely consists of recording sessions, where he films the reactions of a Temple University student, Maia, as she watches video documentation of apartheid in Palestine. The film is meant to question the limits of documentary images as a tool to change the minds of those who are already fixed in their beliefs. The film shows Maia in the process of seeming to waver in her Zionist ideology, when presented with brutal evidence of the violence of Israeli settler colonialism in the West Bank, only for her to end up casting doubt on the veracity of the images she sees. She decides that she cannot trust the images alone because all recorded images are shot from an inherently subjective point of view and claims that the videos would need more context, in order for her to believe them.

Growing up in a Zionist Christian evangelical family, there was little about Maia’s intransigence that surprised me. However, what most disturbed me about the film is the way in which Maia confirms her belief system, not through a lack of media literacy, but actually through tools of media criticism.

At one point, she reacts to a video recorded by a Palestinian father of his frightened children woken up in the middle of the night by the IDF raiding their home. She compares the beginning and end of the video––the fact that we don’t see what happened before or after the video was recorded––to cuts in a Hollywood film or tv show, arguing that the spatial and temporal frames of a video are forms of editing in themselves and, therefore, cannot be trusted as the whole truth. Of course, as Alexandrowicz points out to her, there are mappable distinctions we can make between video evidence, documentary film, and fiction. However, she remains unconvinced and becomes increasingly confident in her counter-reading of the images as constructed and, therefore, untrustworthy. In reflecting on the film, I feel starkly confronted with the fact that the analytical tools I teach in filmmaking classes are not necessarily enough to help students counteract the glut of disinformation and ideology in the media they encounter and can just as easily prompt dangerous misreadings and misperceptions.

I felt similarly disturbed when I learned that Christopher Rufo, the man described by some as “the most influential right wing activist in America” at the moment, began his career as a left-leaning documentary filmmaker. Right up until his 2019 fellowship with the conservative disinformation machine, the Claremont Institute, he was working on a PBS-commissioned documentary about poverty in deindustrialized cities, called America Lost. To look at the start of the film, one could easily mistake it for a fairly run of the mill liberal documentary. It’s only through the increasingly ideological voiceover that Rufo interprets what he sees, not as the ravages of capitalism, but the dissolution of the nuclear family. In his own self-narrative, when confronted with these images, he had to rethink everything he thought he previously knew, hamfistedly underlining his own film’s relationship to the liberal documentary as a tool for political conversion, even as he deploys its tropes for a conservative audience of the already converted.

It’s not just documentary strategies but criticality itself that Rufo wields as a weapon in the new culture war on liberal arts education. He has turned from the liberal documentary form toward making didactic Youtube videos that analyze all of our social structures as having been taken over by liberals, in the wake of the failures of Marxist movements of the 20th century. In these videos and talking head appearances on conservative media, he chases after the bandwagon while also perpetually testing out new dog whistles for racism, transphobia, and misogyny, popularizing Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies as household terms for conservative parents to use in school board grassroots organizing, prompting a new wave of book bans and racist history textbooks. The legislation he advised Trump on to defund DEI trainings in government agencies has been copycatted all across the country to make it much more difficult to teach things that were already quite difficult to teach, not only reanimating old classics like ‘the gay teacher who wants to make their students gay’ but also creating new analytical language for conservatives to prevent the classroom from being used to teach students the analytical tools to be able to recognize these tactics and the historical context to be able to situate them. (1)

Over the same period of Rufo’s rebrand, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make a living, teaching in various liberal arts colleges, recently moving across the country to take a full-time job. In my teaching, I try to foreground access tools like audio description and captioning as fundamental parts of making a film. When students are first exposed to the idea that these tools can be used as part of their creative practices, they often focus on the idea that all description is “subjective.” Although I, of course, agree that creative practices of description push back on the so-called “objectivity” of standard access practices, to name this work a process of making images “subjective” feels disturbingly resonant to me with Maia’s interpretation of what she sees in The Viewing Booth.

Although this might come across as semantic, what I want to understand about description––especially when it comes from more than one person––is whether it can be used, less for telling us something about images themselves and more about demonstrating the position of the person doing the describing. And maybe instead of thinking about these positions as fixed, we can think about description as showing how audiences are situated, in relation to what they see and hear (or don’t see and hear). Another way of putting this is that I’m curious about what these access practices, in which audiences describe what they see and what they hear, might be able to tell us about how a position forms and at what points it is challenged.

This feels particularly urgent to consider in this moment, in which students, teachers, lawyers, filmmakers, and artists––among many others––are, again, experiencing disciplinary and legal action, losing their jobs, and ending up on lists for taking a position about how they interpret images of Palestinian genocide. The images of this genocide hold their own self-evident facts, but the process of how they’re interpreted creates the political reality for those who live in relation to them. This is different from saying that the images are relative. – Jordan Lord

(1) And as Kay Gabriel highlights in her n+1 article, “The Anti-Trans Panic and the Crusade Against Teachers,” these strategies most likely have an economic motive of eroding solidarities between teachers unions and parents of public school students, rather than merely bringing conservative values to the classroom.