Animation on Trial

I Documentary, animation, and cinematic ‘tact’

The question at the heart of this special issue – how do animation and documentary relate to each other? – serves as a useful lever with which to pry open for further contemplation some of the less interrogated assumptions at the center of recent efforts to establish what cinema is and is not within the context of digital media. To ask: ‘What is an animated documentary?’ alongside the question: ‘What is cinema?’ is to invite into the field of thought consideration of how we imagine the relationship of André Bazin’s modernist ‘cinema’ to ‘animation’ and ‘documentary’ as distinct realms of moving images in their own right. Already, these questions are too large to answer fully in a single article, not least because they invoke three terms – cinema, animation, and documentary – that are never self-explanatory. And yet it is against the backdrop of contemporary debates about the status of cinema that I wish to place my analysis of two animated documentary works.

Discussions of animation’s relationship to cinema often invoke spatial metaphors. Stanley Cavell (1979: 167), for example, asserts that there is one ‘whole region of film’ which ‘explicitly has nothing to do with projections of the real world – the region of animated cartoons’. Dudley Andrew (2010: 42) has recently suggested that Bazin’s ‘aesthetic of discovery’ stands ‘at the antipodes of a cinema of manipulation, including most animation and pure digital creation’. Rosalind Krauss (2005: 102), writing about William Kentridge’s animated work in conversation with Cavell, argues that Kentridge is not working with ‘that subset of film called animation’, but rather that ‘in Kentridge’s practice film animation is a support or ground for what takes place within or on top of it, namely a type of drawing that is extremely reflexive about its own condition.’ And numerous other scholars have contemplated whether ‘animation’ sits inside of ‘cinema’, overlaps with it, contains it, or merits a circle all of its own.

If these spatial metaphors highlight the general tendency of academic discourses to territorialize the objects under discussion, especially hybrid objects, they also highlight a more specific phenomenon, one in which the intersection of animation with both live action documentary and fiction films, makes us think more carefully how images shape our relation to, belief in, and movement through the world. ¹ When animation meets documentary, questions about movement (animation’s ‘core’ term) seem inseparably yoked to questions about realism, fact and belief (documentary’s core terms). Among other things, then, this topic provides an interesting counterpoint to Tom Gunning’s (2007) framing of increased attention to movement and animation (something film theory undoubtedly needs) as a ‘move away from’ or corrective to the discourse’s overemphasis on realism-related issues like indexicality.

In Bazin’s writing, the place and meaning of the terms under discussion here, including animation, the documentary, and realism, in modernist cinema evolve over time and in different contexts. ² In ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’ (1946), he describes E Reynaud as ‘the wonderful, the sublime E. Reynaud,’ while simultaneously asserting that ‘any account of the cinema that was drawn merely from the technical inventions that made it possible would be a poor one indeed’ (Bazin, 2005[1967]: 18). Bazin also distinguishes ‘illusion’ and the ‘cheating’ exemplified by the visual trickery of the trompe-l’oeil in painting from ‘an ontogenetic realism’ (p. 19), and it is this kind of distinction that provides the foundation for Andrew’s invocation of an antipodean paradigm to describe the contemporary cinematic landscape.

Among the problems that have arisen from the recent overemphasis on ‘the indexical’ may be that Bazin and the conversations about realism that grow out of his work have become too exclusively aligned with an oversimplified sense of the indexical, photo-based image. As Thomas Elsaesser (2011: 9) argues:

Bazin’s realism was taken as naively pertaining to truth-claims, announcing a correspondence between what was on the screen and what was in the world, clearly a fallacious or ‘ideological’ position. However, Bazin… had always maintained a more nuanced, aesthetic view, arguing that realism is a function of artifice, and that realism comes by way of belief.

Bazin’s distinction between the ‘ontogenetic realism’ of cinema and the trickery of certain kinds of painting implies a separation of cinematic realism from all forms of non-automatic or non-indexical images, and there are many other moments in Bazin’s writing where the automaticity of the mechanically-reproduced image trumps other media, not necessarily in terms of the epistemological content of the image, but rather in terms of the image’s ability to provoke a certain response in the viewer, the ability of the image to open direct experiences of the world across time, laying bare distant realities to the viewer’s ‘love’ (Bazin, 2005[1967]: 15). Nowhere is this position more concretely stated than in ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1945), the essay that has been most responsible for an excessive alignment of Bazin with photographic indexicality:

Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction. A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith. (p. 14)

Although this statement cautions against repressing the question of ‘faith’ as we think about the animated documentary, ‘faith’ is only one aspect, albeit a central and compelling one, of Bazin’s thinking about how realist images help construct and enable our relation to the world. While drawing is here placed in an inferior position to photography, elsewhere it holds an important place in Bazin’s thinking about the ontology of cinema. In ‘An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism’, for example, Bazin repeatedly draws on comparisons with the speed, precision, mobility and selectivity of sketching as he attempts to explain what cinematic ‘tact’ might involve:

Certain genres call for speed, for work done in the heat of the moment, but surgery could not call for a greater sureness of touch, for greater precision. It is only at this price that the Italian film has that air of documentary, a naturalness nearer to the spoken than to the written account, to the sketch rather than the painting. It calls for the ease and sure eye of Rossellini, Lattuada, Vergano, and de Santis. In their hands the camera is endowed with well-defined cinematographic tact. (Bazin, 1972[1948]: 32)

Later in the same essay, he continues:

I have had to dwell at some length on this minor example to avoid making a purely abstract affirmation concerning what I regard, in an almost psychological sense of the word, as cinematic ‘tact’. A shot of this kind by virtue of its dynamism belongs with the movement of a hand drawing a sketch, leaving a space here, filling in there, here sketching round the subject, and there bringing it into relief. I am thinking of the slow motion in the documentary on Matisse which allows us to observe, beneath the continuous and uniform arabesques of the stroke, the varying hesitations of the artist’s hand. In such a case the camera movement is important. The camera must be as equally ready to move as to remain still. (pp. 32–33)

If, for Bazin, drawing fails to match photography in the realm of faith, it later becomes a model for the role camera movement might play in the development of a cinematic realism. Though ‘facts are facts’ (p. 35), our sense of the world is created cinematically by a mind that leaps in response to more than faith alone.

II Drawing the real

Even as film theorists ponder the status of rendered images within the context of digital cinema, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify the indexical elements of animated images when they are guided by a photorealist aesthetic, and often use techniques that deconstruct distinctions between capture and rendering, such as rotoscoping. As the terms, distinctions, and value systems undergirding our grasp of modern images shifts, a number of possible pathways open up. For some, it becomes necessary to insist upon the persistent unique status of the photograph’s relationship to truth and belief, and to interrogate what this persistence reveals about photography. David Rodowick (2007: 62), for example, writes, echoing Bazin:

Despite all self-consciousness about the possibility of altering or falsifying photographs, they will still be taken, and questioned, as historical documents in a way that historical painting or sketches, or, better, the sketchings of court artists will not be, even if the artist was present as witness to the events depicted.

For others, the loosening of the index’s grip on the photorealist image creates a space for taking reportage drawing seriously in its own right, not as an auratic and mythical form of art making with, as Clemens Krümmel (2004: 8–9) puts it, ‘a genesis myth of time immemorial’, nor as a runner-up to either photography or to other media in relation to which it has historically been ‘classified as a secondary discipline, a preparatory technique or mode of commentary in relation to the ‘real artwork’. Taking this approach to drawing has the potential to open up new avenues for thinking about how drawing might enter film theory, whether through drawn animated films, or through the way that drawing inspires cinematic techniques, as when Bazin describes cinematic movement in terms of the sketch. The exhibition for which Krümmel writes, ‘Diving Trips: Drawing as Reportage’, makes an intelligent intervention into how we understand the historical role of drawn images over the last 150 years, considering why fact-based drawing often emerges in ‘difficult’ spaces at particular moments. Krümmel explains:

These spaces include not only sites that for juridical, political, ideological, economic, or technical reasons cannot be captured with other visual media, but also imaginary spaces that refer to utopian projects, inventions of the future, films in planning, and dreams, fantasies, and inner images more generally. (p. 10)

The animated documentary tends to produce a similar narrative to the one we find here about drawing: rendered images of various kinds provide an alternative to photo-based images when, as in the case of the courtroom sketch, the subject being documented lies outside the reach of the camera’s vision. Numerous aspects of the subject contribute to its condition of being visually out of reach, including: its scale (too large or too small for the camera, a factor in animation’s place in the scientific documentary); its subjectivity (an experience lived on the emotional, psychological, or physical plane that may have no obvious visible manifestation, such as love, depression, or pain); its risk factor (a testimony that would put the represented subject in danger, as in Sheila Sofian’s animated 1997 documentary about battered women, Survivors, which uses animated images of women instead of blurred headshots to protect the identity of the speakers); or its surreality, its ability to represent life ‘beneath’ the surface of the visible world. ³

Yet this supplemental paradigm, in which drawn reportage and the animated documentary fill in the gaps left in the camera’s wake, does not account for those animated documentaries made about events that have already been caught on camera and widely shown in their live-action versions (in contrast to filmed testimonies that were filmed but not shown in their live-action version in order to protect the speaker). How, then, do we account for this kind of repetition? Does it mark the photo-based image’s failure to ‘bear away our faith’, or perhaps a response to a (not unprecendented) instance of photo-based faith moving us in the wrong direction? With these questions in mind, I will now turn my attention to a close analysis of two very different animated documentary accounts of courtroom trials. The first, The Simpson Verdict (2002), is a 3-minute animated loop by German–Japanese artist Kota Ezawa documenting the announcement of the OJ Simpson trial verdict on 2 October 1995. The second, Chicago 10 (dir. Brett Morgen, 2007) is a feature-length documentary about the unfilmed trial of the group of political activists known as the ‘Chicago Seven’, made up of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Tom Hayden and Lee Weiner, a group that originally included Black Panther leader Bobby Seale before Seale’s exclusion from the trial.

Ezawa’s work redraws, frame-by-frame, live television footage using computer drawing software, and is exhibited on a television monitor within the art museum context. By contrast, Chicago 10 juxtaposes archival film, television and sound recordings from various sources, animated sequences based upon court transcripts, and sequences that combine live-action and animated material within the same frame. The courtroom provides a particularly interesting context for considering the status of the animated documentary image given that it is one of the few spaces in which, historically, the rendered image has enjoyed ongoing standing since the invention of photography, largely because the faith-inspiring capacities of the photograph have been viewed with suspicion. ⁴ These two examples also allow us to consider: the role of exhibition context in shaping how we evaluate animated documentary images; the place that television occupies in a conversation that is often dominated by a line drawn between only two terms, ‘film’ and ‘digital animation’, bypassing the medium of television altogether; and the difference between the animation of a trial that was filmed and broadcast, like Simpson’s, and one, like the Chicago Seven’s (or Eight’s) that was suppressed from the audio-visual record. ⁵

III Kota Ezawa’s The Simpson Verdict (2002)

Contrary to what the reader may think, what we have here is not a complete transcript of the verdict of the OJ Simpson criminal trial, but rather a transcript of the soundtrack to Kota Ezawa’s animated video installation, The Simpson Verdict, a 3-minute loop in which excerpts from the original audio-recording of the verdict’s pronouncement are synchronized with cartoon-like images of the proceedings that Ezawa redraws and animates from the television footage that was broadcast live around the world in 1996. The two soundtracks are basically indistinguishable except for the fact that Ezawa edits out one section of the text. Yet while in the live television broadcast, sound and image collaborate with the aim of giving the spectator a front row seat at this trial’s moment of revelation, The Simpson Verdict establishes a complex contrapuntal relationship between the authentic recorded soundtrack and the bold blocks of color that recall cut-out paper, leaving viewers wondering not only what, if anything, is revealed by the animated version of this scenario, but also whether the television footage revealed anything more than its drawn counterpart in terms of the ‘truth’ of the Simpson case. This contrapuntal relationship is emphasized by the fact that, while the voices we hear are those of Judge Ito, the clerk, the foreperson, and the jury, the face that most captures our visual attention and dominates the loop is Simpson’s, and he is silent. The absence of any speech by Simpson in The Simpson Verdict not only positions him as a voiceless character before the law, one whose ‘meaning’ is determined solely by how we interpret his visual appearance, but also positions him as a character whose rendered image does not stand in tension with an indexical recording of his own voice, unlike, for example, judge Ito. This is not to claim that Ezawa’s rendering turns Simpson into a victim of either the law or the media; rather, in transforming camera images into colored drawings, Ezawa seems to strip the recording of some of its affective grip on the viewer in order to enable reflection on how the trial images functioned. Athough in The Simpson Verdict we may still watch the minute movements of Simpson’s animated face, we do so less because we believe that we will be able to read his guilt or innocence in these movements than because these movements focus attention on how the spectacular mediation of this trial staged a realist drama about race in late 20th-century America, often drawing on established techniques based on the history and grammar of cinematic courtroom dramas, including the close-up of the accused at the moment of judgment, the courtroom pan and the camera’s slow movement across the faces of the jury.

Our attention is drawn to Simpson’s face through a couple of emphasis techniques, both of which are found in the original television footage but which become more visible to us through Ezawa’s selective redrawing of the footage. First, our conscious knowledge of the absence of the photo-indexical image and the camera’s role in the production of it results in a far greater awareness of the visual effects of the television camera’s framing and movement as they are recreated through frame-by-frame drawings. Ezawa only represents the features of those faces that are in focus in the original footage, and this filtering process allows us to register exactly how few faces are actually in focus in television news footage, and how the camera’s movements and stases direct our vision and make certain interpretive demands upon the view. The camera pans swiftly across the people sitting in court, rendering most of them part of a collective and somewhat blurry mass made up of differing skin tones. By contrast, a more static camera settles on Simpson’s face, often keeping it in center frame, and recording its every movement. Simpson leans in and turns his head as if to hear better; the camera directs our attention to tiny movements of his eyes, eyebrows and nose; he evidences no expression change as the first verdict is announced, and only a small, almost mechanical flash of a smile when the second verdict is announced.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figures 1 and 2.

Stills from The Simpson Verdict (2002). Courtesy of Kota Ezawa and the Haines Gallery.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Stills from The Simpson Verdict (2002). Courtesy of Kota Ezawa and the Haines Gallery.

In their live action version, are these movements television’s equivalents of cinematic ‘facts’ and, if so, what meaning, if any, is the viewer supposed to derive from them and their animated counterparts? How does the original, indexical television footage of this sequence differ from Ezawa’s faithful and laborious reconstruction of it, and does the former tell us something more about the event than the animated reconstruction is able to do, or vice versa? Does the animated version of the footage, for example, stripped of its referentiality, allow us to look without expecting to know in a way that enables us to look at the live-action footage differently?

The Simpson Verdict differs from many recent animated documentaries in offering a drawn animation version of one of the late 20th-century’s largest media events. By creating an animated double of live-action footage that is already very well known, Ezawa’s work operates through a kind of uncanny excess, and its doppelganger quality makes it particularly useful for comparing the difference between live action and animated documentary and the respective relation of these forms to the concept of truth, foregrounded in this work because of the courtroom setting. This process of ‘constructing’ documentary scenarios when live footage of the event already exists is not without precedent; indeed, as Janet Staiger (1996: 43) points out, it has a rather long history, dating back to at least the 1950s. Yet while television re-enactments are produced for events that have been recorded only when ‘it is determined that the re-enactment will produce a better visual impact or is stronger dramatically than the documentary footage’ (p. 43), in this case, the sequence of images, the framing, and the soundtrack all remain the same, and are based on footage already shot and edited for ‘optimum’ impact.

The footage Ezawa appropriates (using lo-res material purchased directly from one of the news channels covering the event, as the footage was not yet available online) was watched live on 3 October 1995 by over 150 million viewers, a striking contrast to Simpson’s civil trial, which banned cameras from the courtroom, resulting in nightly televised dramatic reenactments of the day’s events on E! Entertainment Network (Kahana, 2009: 48). As SL Alexander (1996: 169) points out: ‘more than 50 miles of cable were needed to service the television cameras that provided an unprecedented combined 2,000 hours of live gavel-to-gavel cable TV coverage by Court TV, CNN, and E! Entertainment Network.’ Furthermore, this legal event featured a presiding judge who, in contrast to some other judges, resolutely supported the belief that cameras bring us closer to truth. After the trial, Judge Lance Ito concluded: ‘If you take the cameras out of the courtroom, then you hide, I think, a certain measure of truth from the public’ (p. 172). Unlike Chicago 10, which uses animation as a logical extension of the practice of courtroom drawing to restore a visual dimension to the court transcripts of the unfilmed trial of the Chicago Seven (or Eight) and draws heavily on the standard toolbox of the documentary filmmaker, The Simpson Verdict brings animation to bear on a trial that was defined primarily by being overexposed to the public. Because of this overfamiliarity, it makes us ponder, in a way that Chicago 10 does not, what it was that we were repeatedly shown during the Simpson trial as well as how we were shown it, and the experience of Ezawa’s work involves both looking and the memory of looking.

Ezawa’s selective attribution of facial features highlights the impossible demands we make on faces filmed in close-up, for truth, falsity and, above all, legibility. What, after all, were viewers hoping to see when they gazed on Simpson’s mute face as he received the verdict? Although Ezawa’s redrawing of these faces gives the viewer a feeling that the revelation offered by the original footage is being withheld, the frustrating experience of this animated version may be closer to the experience of the live-action original than we may suspect. As Stanley Cavell (1979: 181) notes of one of cinema’s most extensive live-action explorations of the human face, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Passion of St. Joan, also a narrative of trial and punishment, ‘Dreyer’s film above all declares the power of the camera to interrogate its subjects and, for all its capacity for pitilessness, its final impotence to penetrate the mystery of the human face.’

If Ezawa’s animation doubles the body of Simpson represented in the live footage, it also severs the image from its live referent, emphasizing its status as image, and concentrating our attention on its visual composition. In a recent interview, inspired by Cavell’s (1979: 171) suggestion that the world of cartoons is, unlike the world of ‘movies’, ‘a world devoid of sex or death’, I asked Ezawa whether the fact that his animated bodies are rooted in indexical images of historical subjects makes them seem more vulnerable than other animated bodies, or whether the process of animation destroys their referentiality. He replied:

It’s really both … On the one hand, it takes the corporeal experience away because [the bodies] are abstract and more cartoon-like, but on the other hand, the visual information of the image gets distilled and stylized, and one reason why artists have used stylization for centuries is to get the attention of the viewer… By stylizing something, by distilling information, the information can also become more vibrant and more visceral in a way. So both. (Beckman, 2011a)

Stylization here primarily draws our attention to the question of how symbolically-marked bodies – bodies that evoke the history of racialized looking in America as well as the look of the law – are technologically mediated, and what indexical and non-indexical visual media bring to that history. Does Ezawa’s animated adaptation of the verdict provoke feelings of loss in the viewer? I don’t think that one would have to ascribe to totalizing theories of spectatorial identification to acknowledge that some of the affective intensity of the trial experience seems to evaporate with the documentary footage and excluded frames; but it would be incorrect to frame the relationship of Ezawa’s drawn images to the original footage solely in terms of loss and subtraction, for Ezawa’s process also has additive dimensions. Just as the addition of saturated blocks of color serves a number of purposes, including focusing our visual attention, reminding us of the ultimate two-dimensionality of the photorealist image, and mapping the skin tones in the courtroom, Ezawa’s temporal interventions transform the relationship between time and the bodies in the selected sequence. ⁶ While the recorded voices track the time of televisual liveness, the redrawn images instill this modern event with a different kind of time, the slower pace of frame by frame drawing. Though ‘artist’s animation’ has at times worked to distinguish itself from the mechanical and automatic qualities of modernist media through an assertion of the handmade, in Ezawa’s work, the hand is kept at bay through the phenomenon of computer drawing software, even as the slower temporality of one-image-at-a-time persists.

Hayden White (1996: 23) discusses both the Rodney King video and the ‘endless representations on TV’ of the 1986 NASA Challenger space shuttle explosion after lift-off within the context of the ‘revolution in representational practices known as cultural “modernism” and the technologies of representation made possible by the electronics revolution’, technologies that, presumably, would include cinema, television, and computer animation under the same umbrella. Yet Ezawa’s work, by translating one modern medium into another, resists the homogenization of ‘modern media’, and considers how individual modern technologies of representation have impacted our sense of history’s relation to the image in different ways.

Animation and documentary are interesting in this regard because they both move between the media of cinema and television. Separately, they have both made us think more carefully about how we understand the limits and ambitions of cinematic realism; together, especially at this moment of rapid media transition, they press us to consider cinema’s past and future in less linear and more web-like ways. Ezawa’s work encourages us to think a path through the animated documentary into cinema not because The Simpson Verdict is or claims to be cinematic in any way; in many ways, it doesn’t. Its redrawn footage is shown as a loop on a monitor in the art museum. Rather, this work belongs in our contemporary conversations about how rendered images of reality change or refine our understanding of cinematic realism and the ethical demands this mode of realism makes upon us at least in part because Ezawa uses this same digital re-drawing method to reflect upon a wide variety of modern images, including fiction film. ⁷

Ezawa is only one of a number of artists currently using animation to reconstruct (or document? or reenact?) iconic moments from the film historical canon in ways that may be regarded as homages but could also be thought of as what Suzanne Buchan (2006), describing her own methodology for thinking about animation, calls ‘microanalysis’. Who’s Afraid of Black, White and Grey? (2003), Ezawa’s two-channel installation, for example, projects animated redrawings of sequences from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (dir. Mike Nichols, 1966); but the work’s title simultaneously gestures toward Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue II, an abstract painting from 1967, the year after the release of Nichols’s film, implying that the movement between live-action cinema and animation simultaneously requires a movement between the histories of film and art. Similarly, Ezawa’s Last Year At Marienbad 3D (4 minutes, 2008) redraws parts of Alain Resnais’ 1961 film. In this work, the artist selects scenes from the film in which characters appear motionless, and this stillness becomes the paradoxical starting point for his three-dimensional, silent animated film, as if challenging the view of cinema as a response to an ever-accelerating world. Most recently, Ezawa’s installation Odessa Staircase Redux (2009) featured, among other works, pen and ink re-drawings of the frames surrounding each cut of the Odessa Staircase sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925), itself an experimental reenactment of an historical event (and one of the questions this work raises is how animated drawings of an event differ at the affective, epistemological and formal levels from live-action reenactments). Extending still further the initial translation process from film to drawing, Ezawa also published these and other images from the installation in book form. Combining cinema’s pre-history with its avant-garde tradition of discontinuity editing, this series of images functions as a kind of anti-animation, a failed flip-book that promises but ultimately withholds the satisfaction of continuous motion and the enlivening of still forms, offering the book’s reader–viewer a frustrating series of cuts instead of the thrill that illusions of motion tend to bring.

At times, the contemporary art world’s engagement with film history is viewed as destructive to the integrity of the cinematic experience. Andrew (2010: 86), for example, writes that ‘the museum has officially kidnapped the structure of the film experience so as to contain it for the delectation of its own public.’ He continues:

In the postmodern period, artists have dismantled the film frame, letting the cinematic lifeblood hemorrhage into a range of multimedia states named by Raymond Bellour ‘Entr’Images.’ He, along with Jacques Aumont, Philippe Dubois, and Luc Vancherie, have tracked the itinerary of two generations of visual artists who have carted their images out of the cinema. (p. 86)

While Andrew’s own investment clearly lies with a particular kind of cinematic modernism, he does check the nostalgia that haunts his writing, recognizing that:

Cinema must press forward into the new century, by taking into itself the subject matter that surrounds it, increasingly a new media culture. The impure films that result will no doubt comprise a different cinema from the one we have known, but it will be a cinema worthy of its past, to the extent that it maintains what might best be termed the cinematic ethos. An attitude, rather than a doctrine, is what André Bazin passed down, an attitude of curiosity, spontaneity, and responsiveness to a reality conceived of as indefinitely enigmatic and worthy of our care. (p. 94)

Part of our task, then, might involve considering whether, why and how the animated documentary responds to and elicits cares for the enigmatic world it represents, and what challenges it encounters as it tries to do so.

IV Chicago 10 (dir. Brett Morgen, 2007)

Brett Morgen made Chicago 10 not only because he wanted young people opposed to America’s contemporary wars to understand the ‘commitment’ of protestors in the 1960s, but also because, having studied the 16mm documentary footage, a 1970s BBC documentary and the 1980s HBO re-enactment of the trial, Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8, he felt that ‘the one thing lacking was something cinematic that shows how chaotic and frightening the situation must have been’ (Hayden, 2008: 116, emphasis added). Wanting to ‘add something to the canon’, he needed to ‘use the tools that are available to us today’ (p. 116). It is easy to see what Morgen means by a ‘cinematic’ treatment of the material when the film is compared with Ezawa’s Simpson Verdict installation, and yet it is precisely this ‘cinematic’ identity of contemporary animated realism that poses a problem for Andrew in his contemplation of the present and future life of a Bazinian cinematic ethos. Andrew’s resistance to certain modes of animation as cinema has less to do with an unwavering commitment to the indexical photographic image – after all, he highlights Bazin’s comparison of the Bell and Howell newsreel camera with the elliptical and high-speed form of the sketch – and much more to do with a concern that animated realities run the risk of eradicating the tension film reveals between ‘the human (imagination, intention) and the recalcitrant chunks of recorded reality’ (p. 30). The best filmmakers working with animation, for Andrew, are those who, like Jia Zhang-ke, operate within a modernist paradigm and deploy animation ‘always in the service of cinema’ (p. 59). Does Chicago 10 fit within this sense of ‘the cinematic’ and, if not, how might we begin to describe and evaluate its attempt to animate the real?

In a careful analysis of Chicago 10 within a dissertation that provides one of the best surveys of the history of this mode of documentary filmmaking to date, Annabelle Honess Roe (2009: 134) suggests that while the film, with its stylized graphics, never attempts a ‘fake indexicality’, it mobilizes a number of audio-visual techniques to create a sense of verisimilitude. These include: (1) the use of motion capture technology; (2) occasional use of photorealist animation that contrasts with the overall cartoon-style graphics, as in the depiction of water droplets at one moment in the film; (3) the use of intertitles to highlight the court scenes’ reliance on archived transcripts; (4) oral similitude through the use of voice imitator Hank Azaria, the rerecording by defense attorney Leonard Weinglass of his own words, and the use of original radio show recordings; (5) repeated visual matches, for example using clothing, as the film cuts between animated and documentary footage; (6) the doubling of the content of some of the animated sequences in documentary footage to corroborate the accuracy of the rendered scenes; and finally, (7) the compositing of live action and animated sequences, making it hard, at times, Roness Hoe suggests, ‘to discern the animation from the blurry live action footage in which it is placed’ (p. 136). Although Roness Hoe briefly considers the possibility that the cartoon style could function as a symbolic analogy for a trial that Jerry Rubin described as ‘a cartoon show’ (p. 138), she ultimately rejects this interpretation in favor of an argument that stresses the way Morgen gives animation ‘the same epistemological status as the “genuine” documentary material’ (p. 137).

I want to take this last comment as the starting point for an alternative way of thinking about Chicago 10. Although Honess Roe acknowledges that one of the film’s themes is that ‘the trial was a joke’ (p. 138), she does not really elaborate upon the consequences of Rubin describing the trial as a ‘cartoon show’. Yet a parallel reading might usefully consider the status of ‘the cartoon’ within the world being depicted in Chicago 10 in order to understand the historical questions that emerge from the interaction between documentary and animated footage within this film. The two forms exist in a chiasmic relation to each other, criss-crossing the real and presenting what Bazin described as ‘fragments of imaged reality’ (1972[1948]: 30–31) without ever fully claiming to capture it completely. Like the use of the split screen, the juxtaposition of animated and live-action documentary footage allows Morgen to explore the existence of competing realities even as other aspects of the film encourage the viewer to resolve the two modes into a singular and coherent sense of the past. While some of the film clearly works to equate animation and live-action recording, I want to explore why the depicted events simultaneously seem to resist this alignment.

In his interview with Brett Morgen, Tom Hayden (2008: 118), a member of the Chicago 7 and a leader of MOBE (the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), points out that Morgen’s focus on Abbie Hoffman over other prominent protestors allows the ‘theatrical factor’ to supersede the ‘drier historical one’, noting that one of Hoffman’s autobiographies is entitled, Soon to Be A Major Motion Picture. The film does not contradict Hayden’s characterization of Hoffman as theatrical – think of his animated stand-up comedy routines, or his appearance in a top hat inscribed with the word ‘YIPPIE’ in yellow letters along with a striped t-shirt that aligns him with Dr Seuss’s Cat in the Hat and other comic mischief-makers. It does, however, suggest that the importance of the cartoon extends beyond either Hoffman’s crafted persona or the value of the trial, having rather some broader implications for how we might understand the interaction of different kinds of movement, including political movement, in the context of the evolution, articulation, and representation of political action at this particular historical moment.

The actions of MOBE and other affiliated antiwar protestors in the late 1960s repeatedly invoke a cartoon and anti-realist logic. ⁸ Morgen foregrounds, rather than represses such moments, making the film’s juxtaposition of live action and animation more interesting – and perhaps more cinematic – than it might otherwise be. The film’s archival and animated footage documents the centrality of theatricality and caricature to a generation of forward-looking protestors who invoked the ‘cartoonish’ in order to reject existing structures of reality and to reach toward an unknown future alternative. As our own present tries to understand this ‘reach’ through animated images of the past, animation extends into the political and historical realm, asking us to consider not only the relation between past and contemporary uses of cartoon-inspired political strategies, but also whether the representation of ‘cartoon-style’ protests in animated rather than live-action form inhibits or increases the effectiveness of the selected strategy by aesthetically doubling it. At one point, Rubin and Hoffman enter court wearing judges’ robes; when told to remove them, they do so, only to reveal that they are wearing policemen’s uniforms below their robes, as if the law is simply an onion-like layered charade. Clown faces and masks worn at demonstrations offer the human face not as a site of elusive truth, but as a potential place for conscious political inscription. The speaking animal, which for Stanley Cavell (1979) is one of the figures marking the boundary between ‘movies’ and cartoons, haunts the archival footage of political protest as crowds chant ‘oink, oink, oink’ at the so-called ‘pigs’. Although cameras capture a wide variety of caricatured images on posters in marches, one poster stands out as explicitly asking us to consider what kind of politics is forged at the juncture of the cartoon and the indexical image: a photograph of President Johnson shown disappearing down a drawn toilet bowl is accompanied by the slogan, ‘Th- Th- Th- Th- That’s All Folks!’

While Honess Roe (2009) focuses on Morgen’s successful use of ‘oral similitude’, my own experience of Chicago 10 left me less with a sense of the successful stitching together of the animated image with the human voice than of a landscape in which animated bodies were haunted by the specter of (often non-matching) ‘real’ bodies, especially when recognizable ‘star’ voices like those of Nick Nolte and Mark Ruffalo were ‘affixed’ to historical figures such as Thomas Foran and Jerry Rubin. Similarly, when archival recordings of voices were juxtaposed with the voices of imitators, the film’s characters started to proliferate in uncanny ways because of these (barely) perceivable differences. Although this ‘cluttering’ effect was often productive and thought-provoking, it seemed to resist rather than court an aesthetic of seamlessness.

Similar disruptions to a coherent realist aesthetic happen at the visual level and, as with the sound examples I mention, they often occur in the context of gestures that, at least at first glance, seem designed to operate precisely in the service of a photo-realist aesthetic. First, we might note Morgen’s use of color to signal temporal shifts between the past and present, something that he borrows from a moment in documentary history when it was more important than it is now to establish what Janet Staiger (1996: 43) calls ‘the ontological status of the material’. Staiger writes: ‘Another way to differentiate the ontological status of the material has been to shoot in black and white for the dramatized past and in color for the current interviews.’ As Morgen switches between vivid saturated color and black and white animation, he complicates any simple distinctions between ‘live action’ and ‘animated’ documentary by reminding us that documentary history is full of changing codes of realism, as well as of live action re-enactments and imaginative dramatizations whose epistemological status is anything but secure. Similarly, in one flashback sequence depicting animated Yippies brainstorming about what form their actions might take, a live-action Western plays on an animated TV set. Although this juxtaposition might seem to foreground the difference between the political actions of young Americans against the myths of their forefathers perpetuated through spectacle culture, this reading is held in check by a later scene in which we learn from a live-action TV news reporter that 10–12-year-old Chicago boys have begun to replace their games of ‘Cowboys and Indians’ with a new game: ‘Cops and Demonstrators’, perhaps suggesting that American political paradigms have not shifted as much as might have been hoped. Self-reflexive shots questioning the epistemological status of the ‘genuine’ documentary material abound. The knowledge-value of the live-action footage of the Democratic convention is held in check by the giant CBS NEWS sign that hangs within the conventional hall, reminding us that we are watching a for-camera production; and when, prior to a news conference with the Yippies, the camera operators are asked, ‘Is anyone not rolling?’, one Yippie simply mutters: ‘La Dolce Vita’.

The film’s exploration of the relationship between politics, history, and different kinds of moving images is finally explored in more abstract ways through the representation of movement itself, and specifically through a rather self-conscious highlighting of both the depicted body in motion, and the animated illusion of the camera’s movements, as if to ask what political or philosophical worth either the movement of the world or the movement of the camera can have if they are merely rendered rather than seen through the lens of each other as they are, for example, in Gilles Deleuze’s movement–image. Although, as Honess Roe (2009: 132) points out, human motion is rendered throughout the animation sequences with the help of motion capture technologies, the resulting lack of realism is less technically flawed (something that Honess Roe’s description of the movements as ‘blocky and jerky’ suggests) than downright uncanny. While OJ Simpson’s face barely twitches as he awaits his verdict in Ezawa’s redrawing of the trial’s live action footage, in Chicago 10, the animated Yippies literally embody the mobilization for which they are fighting as they seem constantly to sway slightly, even when seated, not unlike the alien motion featured in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks (1996). Their uncanny mobility is fully realized at the moment when Allen Ginsberg floats slightly above the ground as the trial proceeds.

Just as Morgen resists naturalizing human motion in the animated sequences, so he seems also to exaggerate the effects that connote the ‘movement’ of the fictional camera, as if to remind us that the presence of the camera is only imagined, as perhaps might also be our faith in the objectivity of even the ‘real’ camera. When real cameras are allowed in real courtrooms, the mandate for non-intrusive filming often results in particularly static shots, something fictional courtroom scenes often mimic, perhaps for the sake of realism. By contrast, Morgen’s use of animation permits him to explore how the camera might film a courtroom if given free range. Swift pans from prosecutor to defender to suggest, as if in a rapid sketch, the dramatic pathways of affective intensities moving around the room. Low-angle shots emphasize Judge Hoffman’s authority. Helicopter shots zoom down on people on the stand from the far corners of the ceiling, an illusion of a swooping downward camera motion that evokes an earlier moment in the film when Morgen superimposes archival footage of falling parachutes and bombs over animated courtroom sequences. In such moments, animation does not ‘piggyback’ on documentary footage in order to be corroborated by it, as Honess Roe correctly suggests it does in some of the film’s other scenes. Rather, Morgen invokes a collage aesthetic familiar to us from artists like Martha Rosler, and particularly her ‘Bringing the War Home’ series from 1967–1972, one that uses the difference between styles to highlight collective refusals to examine how disparate spaces, spaces that could not be represented through the gaze of a single lens, must be seen together, not in denial of history, but because of it.

In 1999, Jane Gaines suggested that the task of contemporary political documentary had to do with ‘finding a way to be both a champion of the critique of realism and a defender of the uses of realism’ (p. 93). Perhaps this is still the case. If contemporary technological developments, including the recent expanded interest in animated realities, are not (or not only) an abandonment of an existing, modernist cinematic ethos, but rather (or also) an attempt to give form to lived experiences and political realities that live-action realist forms have failed to grasp, then they provide an important space for the development of thoughts and political practices that currently only exist in sketch-like form.