In the production phase of my audio paper, I have been drawn away from abstraction as an aesthetic device. I love abstraction in art, but I’m wary of deploying it intentionally in a work intended to convey a thesis. My mind is having trouble distinguishing the professorial and the artful, and my immediate instinct is to set a spoken essay to sound, rather than assemble an argument out of sound. I’m concerned that this appears facile, or not as aurally dimensional as something more dynamic.
Ken Burns is a documentary filmmaker famous for his lengthy works largely focusing on American history. His first, and most significant project, The Civil War from 1990, connected with me as I formulated how to proceed with developing this audio paper.
The now-iconic, classic example of television documentary miniseries concerns the American Civil War, comprised of much contemporary photography to illustrate the events. It’s a very immersive, early example of styles of documentary filmmaking that quickly became the standard, yet this series is so distinct. In some respects, I envision my audio paper functioning in a similar sense; like a documentary film with the screen off. However, the academic validity of a film like The Civil War, or the nostalgic tone that Burns often is guilty of indulging in, gives me pause. As David Harlan (2003, pp. 170) astutely states;
‘And then there is the matter of his presentism: Burns is not really interested in the past at all – or rather, he is interested in the past only insofar as he can make it reflect and dramatize his own interior emotional life (and, as it turns out, the interior emotional lives of tens of millions of other Americans). But we academic historians are interested in the past, if not ‘in and for itself’ than certainly as something more substantial than a reflecting device in which we can meditate upon our own sensibilities.’
In many ways, I feel this is the immediate danger of the audio paper medium. The urge to acknowledge the self and our partial relationship to what we choose to present, how we present it, is unavoidable. Once that academic rigour borrows some of formatting of art while distinguishing itself from it, what is the result? Is history truly solid? My instinct tells me no. Salomé Voeglin described it to us as the listener is ‘invited to reach meaning’. I believe striking this balance will be critical in my paper.
By chance, I happened to catch myself watching Dan Snow’s BBC documentary How the Celts Saved Britain, and feeling uncomfortable. I usually avoid this kind of BBC programming, but the imagery of the island of Iona and talk of ancient Ireland (an ancestral home of mine) immobilised me in that after dinner stupor.
However, as the narrative progressed I increasingly detected the colouring of history by dominant narratives. I have always felt it thorny and cringeworthy to prod Christianity as a culturally destructive force, so it’s odd to find myself working on a project concerning that. I reject the angry atheistic archetype, I’ve spent a lot of close time with the Christian faith, and I consider myself a fearful, believing agnostic. What discomfited me in the documentary was the way Snow, the writers and production designers continually presented the original pagan cultures of the British Isles as evil, dark and creepy, like a cheap episode of Ghost Adventures. Bias is such a difficult thing to navigate while making political works, especially when dealing with history. I want to approach the subject matter of my audio paper with little emotion, examining critically and unguardedly, and this stray colouring of cultures is something I would hope to avoid somewhat. That’s why I now feel reassured, as I look retrospectively on Seismograf’s Audio Paper Manifesto, where it states, ‘the audio paper is situated and partial’. In a sense, there’s no real escaping bias and partiality in the thesis format. What is more significant is the thoroughness and depth of research I must go to in order to fully understand how to discuss my chosen subject at length.
Bibliography:
Harlan, D. (2003) ‘Ken Burns and the Coming Crisis of Academic History’, Rethinking History, 7(2), pp. 170