Stan Douglas, Evening project description, 1993
Evening
The proposed project, tentatively titled "Evening," will be a development of the video installation I produced in Paris in the spring of 1992, Hors-champs. In the course of the earlier production, I studied, and then reconstructed, the technical and ideological apparatus of an early moment in television history which has since become paradigmatic of broadcast conventions in Europe today. But more specifically, in its subject matter and in its physical form, Hors-champs addressed the social situation of the African American expatriates who lived in France during the 1960s—both their concrete, political exile and the one of fetishism which is perhaps an analogue of the racism peculiar (but not limited) to the country in which they were born. The present production will be concerned with coincident forms of media representation, but it will exchange the conventions of entertainment programming in France for those of news broadcasting in the United States, working under the hypothesis that: television aided the American Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s by making local conflicts national and (later) international issues but, within a decade, began to represent precipitates of the movement as unreasoned or fragmented "special interests" lacking historical continuity.
Background
Evening is being sponsored by the Renaissance Society Gallery in Chicago as a part of an exhibition that will also include Hors-champs—and it will be developed in consideration of broadcast idioms and historical events from the Chicago area. During a brief research trip in June of this year, I visited archives and tape collections in order to get a sense of local broadcast vernaculars and editorial policies c. 1965–75. It was not long before I was made aware of two very different but related crises in the legitimation of television news which occurred in relatively quick succession: the controversies surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in August 1968 and the assassination of local Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in December of the following year.
This was, of course, the Democratic Convention disrupted by SDS-associated demonstrators who were arrested or dispersed brutally by the Chicago Police and National Guard. It was also the first such event to be presented live and in color by network television. Newspaper and television editorials and proclamations by politicians soon after the confused confrontations all seemed to dwell on the same rhetorical figure—Was television making news or merely reporting it?—absurdly suggesting that the situation could be otherwise, and that because the demonstrations and (most of) the violence took place outside the convention hall, they were "outside" the province of convention coverage. By the time of the police assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, television news had become much less adventurous in its coverage. The narrative of an unprovoked "hail of gunfire directed at police officers" provided by State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan (later indicted for conspiracy) were taken as fact until it was proven that all but one of the ninety bullets shot in Hampton's apartment were fired by police guns. In an uncanny overture to coverage of the Persian Gulf War twenty years later, stations presented reconstructions of the scene (interpreted by police officials) rather than the scene itself—fabrications which even included crude animated cartoons.
Amid the political confrontations which occurred elsewhere in the US and in virtually every continent of the world, 1968–69 also witnessed formal and technical transformations in television news. Responding to its chronically low ratings and an understanding of the impact of the personality of a newscaster, the Chicago-area ABC-owned station, WLS, introduced its widely imitated "Happy Talk News" format. Two or more anchors would sit at the same podium so they would be able to discuss stories, make jokes, and generally demonstrate their wit and sensitivity in a curious combination of journalism and entertainment. This moment also saw the transition from combined black and white (field shooting) and color (studio) to all-color news broadcasts. Thus, just as television news began to present social Life in the US with greater "accuracy," it became more and more removed from that realm and obsessed with its own internal logic. This is not to say that methods of reportage had previously been able to offer a more adequate representation of its culture, rather that in the process of making news there was now an increasing evening-out of temporal and social differences.
The Production
In November, I plan to make one more research trip to Chicago before writing the script for Evening. At this time I will return to television archives to acquire VHS research copies of news film, and to interview witnesses from both sides of the camera: television journalists from the network stations and the Tribune station, print journalists from the major papers and community papers, such as the Chicago Daily Defender, past SDS organizers, past Black Panther Party members, and the lawyers at the People's Law Office who forced the Hampton case back onto the agenda of the news media by seeing it through fifteen years of litigation.
Evening will be shot in March in a studio at the University of Chicago with a local crew, and a cast that I hope will include local television journalists. Post-production will be completed in Vancouver. When complete, the project will consist of three reconstructed moments from the transformation in news stagecraft and editorial policy outlined above: three condensed, ten-minute evening news "programs" from the same fictional station will be played back from videodisc and simultaneously projected side-by-side on a ten-foot wall, moving diachronically from left to right, from black and white to "living color." Each will begin with an identical signature tune performed in a distinct style of arrangement, followed by three anchors simultaneously announcing, "Good evening…" The programs themselves will be composed of a collection of items actually reported on three specific days c. 1968–69, but as significant as this content will be the manner of its delivery: how much it abides by the conventions of print media, the familiar or formal vocabulary, the physical and social types of the anchors, what constitutes a "human-interest story" or diversion, nomenclature of racial groups, etc. Although there will be inserts of "remote reports" and the use of actual archive footage to illustrate specific stories, a constant reference for each channel will be (as much as it is in television news today) the voice and image of the anchor.
The script will be written in consideration of the fact that each monologue will be heard simultaneously with at least two others. In advance of the studio shooting, each voice of this "trio" will be recorded separately on a four-track machine (with SMPTE timecode on the remaining track), this will allow us to get the music of their interrelationships in exact sync before going to the studio. And once in the studio, performing for the camera, an earphone will give a performer constant reference to the counterpoint of the other voices and to the less polished, more aleatory off-the-street inserts. This is not unlike contemporary methods of news program construction, in which each moment is strictly monitored by stopwatch and predicated upon absolute "editorial" control of time and space through procedures developed three decades ago, whose supposed necessity is, today, constantly reinforced by economic demands and unquestioned habit.
I have often used musical methods and metaphors in my work because in both musical practice and reception there have developed very concise methods of presenting the relationship of an individual voice to a collective, and the transformation of that relationship over time. For television, also, time is the crucial category: yearly, weekly, daily, and half-hourly units of time containing "live," pre-recorded, and mechanically repeating elements. Whatever the intention of a particular journalist or the policies of a station manager, the effect of North American models of television news is the fragmentation of interrelated events and atomization of historical processes, with only the form itself as a constant. I have chosen to work with this moment in television news practice because it was when this (psychological and "musical") fugue first began.
Vancouver
September 1993