{"id":5617,"title":"Revolutionary Pleasures: Wrecking the Text in Compilation Documentary","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/revolutionary-pleasures-wrecking-text-compilation-documentary","version":"7441fca5a663ae1fd0421447ffe83c3272ecb3196982e2e80ce3c2478f7734e3","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4421172+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Patricia R. Zimmermann"}],"authorKeys":["Patricia Zimmermann"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Afterimage","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Visual Studies Workshop","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"March 1989","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Rochester, New York","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"16","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"8","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1011","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Revolutionary Pleasures: Wrecking the Text in Compilation Documentary.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/revolutionary-pleasures-wrecking-text-compilation-documentary.","publication":"Patricia R. Zimmermann. Revolutionary Pleasures: Wrecking the Text in Compilation Documentary. Afterimage. Visual Studies Workshop. March 1989.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5617.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC1011","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":41182},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":829}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Before wrecking the text and breaking the discursive laws of unified themes, those two components that mortar the ideological configuration of documentary, let us start with fantasy: physical power; escape from academia; the wilderness of unconquered terrain; impending death by frostbite, accident or bad navigation; the reenactment of the great narrative of man and now woman conquering nature with willpower and technology. To leave, for a moment, our safe, rock- and glacier-free lecture halls that require no pitons, nor dogsleds, no oxygen nor compasses, and enter a documentary world where signification means reading topographic maps and where deconstruction means breaking your bivouac or losing your mainsail in following seas. This other discursive terrain poses as anything but discursive: it is natural, material, indomitable, and overpowering: the world of the 1987 PBS documentary series \u0022Adventure\u0022. If we detour from the utopian pleasures of revolution for a moment and investigate the PBS series \u0027Adventure,\u0027 perhaps we can place the political necessity for a more diverse, discursive, discontinuous, and heterogeneous documentary practice into greater relief. We may be able to demonstrate by counterexample, its urgency as both a political intervention and as a revival of what Jurgen Habermas identifies as communicative action, what film theorists name active spectatorship, what the rest of us might simply dub political participation, or what Marx might call making history. Beginning in January of 1987, PBS broadcast a weekly series of one-hour documentaries on various adventures around the world, hosted by Dodge Morgan, who himself circumnavigated the globe single-handedly on his sailboat. The adventures we observe from the safe confines of our couches range from a 1000-mile dogsled race in the Yukon, a woman\u0027s climb of K2 in the Himalayas, a middle-aged Englishman\u0027s solo climb of the north face of the Eiger, a balloon expedition over Mt. Everest, and, of course, a super-8 film of Morgan\u0027s own sailing expedition. Besides witnessing the heroics of each adventurer\u0027s physical power, endurance, and commitment to outwitting and conquering nature, each film has yet another hero, operating in partnership with the screen presence, but invisible to us: the cameraperson. Sometimes, as in the K2 climb, the cameraperson figures as a character, while other times, as in the Morgan episode, the cameraperson is replaced by the technological advances of the remote switch. The dyad of the adventurer who battles nature and the adventurer who battles camera technology betrays the impossibility of the unmediated expedition and the unmediated text and terrain. Indeed, the spectacle of the expedition, whether Everest, K2, the Yukon, the South Pole, or the Eiger, summons the companion spectacle of the equally physical and savvy cameraperson battling composition, exposure, good sound, and narrative coherence. In effect we witness the collaboration of romanticism and modernism, of the individual and the machine. This doubling of spectacle--the human by the technological, the technological by the human--swallows up the once emancipatory Brechtian potential of self-reflexivity and the exposure of the means of production, spitting them out as the media version of the necessary gear one orders from REI or Wilderness Experience before a climb. Spectacle permeates all levels of the \u0022Adventure\u0022 image: the content, the production, and even the reproduction. Everyone, everything, every place exceeds us. Every image demands an immobilized gaze. Our participation in the series is less one of passive awe than of spiritual reverence for this revival of rugged individualism and simple narratives like man or woman against nature. Not only does \u0022Adventure\u0022 celebrate the technological and rational advances of late capitalism that allow this individualism to flourish but it simultaneously vilifies a previous history of bad maps, poor tent, death, and destruction as the consequences of a primitive, scientifically underdeveloped capitalism. The slow-paced, electronic New Age music threaded throughout each film quotes religious hymns in tone but reproduces them with the dexterity and predictability of electronic music. This aural equivalent of a Gregorian chant encodes technological control as mystical and transcendental. \u0022Adventure,\u0022 then, suggests that technology and individual derring-do can transcend history.(1) In a larger context, three analyses loom around this series. First, while ravenously coopting critical apparatuses like self-reflexivity and lightweight cameras, the series is heavily invested with the assumptions of modernism: the idea of the unified subject, a refusal of mass culture, a notion of the individual at his or her limits, the spectator expanding her possibilities through another\u0027s vision, an investigation into extending the medium and its forms through technology. (2) As one flips through the TV Guide, it may seem an outrageous confusion and a preposterous assertion to identify the \u0022Adventure\u0022 series as \u0022modernist.\u0022 If compared to modernist film classics like Jean Vigo\u0027s A Propos de Nice (1928). Dziga Vertov\u0027s Man With the Movie Camera (1928), or Walter Ruttman\u0027s Berlin. Symphony of a Great City (1927), the \u0022Adventure\u0022 series does not unreel as a formal tour de force, as an exploration of the formal boundaries of the medium. It does not utilize canted angles nor explosive editing. On the surface, comparing \u0022Adventure\u0022 to these films may seem like comparing macaroni and cheese to jambalaya. However, in relation to other films in the adventure genre, say, for example, a typical National Geographic special on kayaking in Iceland or on polar bears, this series situates its excellence, its uniqueness, its significance, and its difference from its more mundane predecessors through its style. This cinematic style depends on, at minimum, a veneer of modernist techniques: atonal music connoting high art, lightweight equipment signifying an ability to create different images, and self-reflexivity representing both authorship and subjectivity. All of these strategies signal the interiorization of what was previously only physical. Secondly, the series inscribes itself politically through is historical absences and its amnesia, perhaps from a falling rock or attitude sickness, of our contemporary social and political context. In 1987, one could, for example, if one had an expanded tier cable system and a remote, watch both \u0022Adventure\u0022 and the less beautifully photographed and less interestingly paced Iran-Contra Hearings--a sort of postmodern pastiche of male adventures in the third world. While its surface (cinematography, music, voice-over, and sometimes editing) denotes experimentation within the rather staid boundaries of the adventure epic, \u0022Adventure\u0022\u0027s content locates it within the realm of bourgeois individualism and an eternal, ahistorical sphere, of conquest. Will, challenge, and triumph. Because most f the \u0022Adventure\u0022 films chronicle individual rather than collective efforts, they ratify an obsessive egocentrism, one replicated in the media construction of figures such as Ivan Boesky, Donald Trump, H. Ross Perot, and Lee Iacocca. These films present determination, planning, and drive as exempt from social relations, historical context, or capitalism. Despite their exotic geographical mise-en-scene, they deny a geography of locations, borders, cultures, people, struggles, and cultural difference. Instead, they trace an interior geography of the adventurer\u0027s psyche. Thirdly, along the lines of Ariel Dorfman\u0027s analysis of the Lone Ranger, one can analyze the series as the exploitation of the third world as-itself unmediated nature and spectacle by first-world, bourgeois, white people, who rely on third-world sidekicks for guidance, map reading, and hauling. (3) These lone rangers of the mountains, the seas, the tundra, and the rocks are examples of the magnificence of multinational capitalism\u0027s financing of nineteenth-century myths: exploration; individualism, decontextualized and floating free; control over nature and technology; and administrative abilities to organize, lead, and persevere. Of course, all of these analyses are true and are the stuff of our trade, our own class position as academics, and our own discursive pleasure as expedition leaders into textuality, contextuality, and intertextuality. But, in a more dialectical assault (or to use \u0022Adventure\u0022 terminology, ascent), I would also like to extract the components of the pleasures of this series \u0022Adventure\u0022 and resuscitate them for a larger notion of politics and documentary. Whether we deconstruct, psychoanalyze, historicize, or politicize \u0022Adventure\u0022 for its uninformed allegiance to a unified text and passive spectatorship, its continuities, its formal elegance, its insistence on the seamless reproduction of the real, and its supposed naturalization of representation, there still remains in the rubble of pitons, codes, ice axes, and theories, a pleasure and subjectivity that can be utilized and strategized. The pleasures in the rubble here imbricate the pleasures of the future, of fantasy, of hope. These are pleasures not of the text but of place, history, the body, and geography. These pleasures position spectators in the domain of escape from their own geographic confines and the redundancy of work into the challenge of the unknown where mind and body are not separated. These pleasures also invoke the fantasy of one\u0027s own necessary, significant, arid sufficient subjectivity, of sharing experience with others, of the imagination required by the unknown. They insist on action and control in the face of increasing bureaucratization and automation. These pleasures are not so simply bourgeois and reactionary reductions of the complexities of modern life since they contain, at least, the fantasy of action, change, and integration with nature. Terry Eagleton has argued, for example, that modernism both expresses and mystifies a sense of one\u0027s own historical conjuncture as being somehow peculiarly pregnant with crisis and change. He insists on a more dialectical exchange between modernism\u0027s myths of the individual and postmodernism\u0027s foraging into discontinuity, multiplicity, and fractured subjects, themselves too easily revived in a reactionary pluralism where political actions and struggle don\u0027t matter as much as diffusion and dispersion. He argues for the reintegration of art and politics, for art\u0027s participation in social relations. (4) Before working through the documentary intervention of what I have termed new compilation documentary, I have attempted to position it in struggle and relationship to this more pervasive, digestible, and seamless form proliferated in the \u0022Adventure\u0022 series, a sort of continuum extending from naturalized modes of representation and history to a more deliberately constructed and dissected practice of interrogating representation as authenticity and inscribing history. Andreas Huyssen has argued, for example, that the historical avant-garde and mass culture participate in a \u0022hidden dialectic.\u0022 The avant-garde depends on mass culture as its Other, as a measure of its distance from homogenized cultural practice. He further explains that mass culture in the twentieth century would not be possible without technologies of mass production. However, technology infuses this historical avant-garde: Huyssen cites dynamism, machine cult, collage, assemblage, montage, and photomontage as evidence. Art, he claims, \u0022liberated technology from its instrumental aspects.\u0022(5) This dialectic between the avant-garde and mass culture, a dialectic that hinges on a mutual disavowal but simultaneous dependency, informs a reading of the formation of documentary. While the classic documentary style of \u0022Adventure\u0022 seems light years and ideologies away from a more polemical, political, and aggressive compilation documentary, it t","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":41182,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}