6/3/17, 10:33 PM Beyond bias: stock imagery and paradigmatic politics in Citizens United documentaries, text only Page 1 of 34 https://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/-krzychStockFootage/text.html JUMP CUT A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA copyright 2016, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media Jump Cut, No. 57, fall 2016 Beyond bias: stock imagery and paradigmatic politics in Citizens United documentaries by Scott Krzych In 2008, Citizens United, a production company specializing in direct-to-DVD political documentaries, distributed Hillary: The Movie (Alan Peterson), a scathing critique of Hillary Clinton. The timing of the film’s release led to a court challenge by the FEC, alleging a violation of federal election laws that prohibit corporately sponsored campaign advertising within thirty days of a primary election. The case eventually appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court (Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission). In the now infamous ruling, the Court’s conservative majority effectively removed limitations on corporate expenditures for political campaigns, bestowing on corporations the same right of free speech previously reserved for individuals.[1] [open endnotes in new window ] The controversy surrounding the Citizens United decision and its impact on campaign finance in subsequent elections has perhaps diverted any media or scholarly attention away from the film on which the case originally centered, not to mention the growing library of documentaries distributed by Citizens United in the past decade. This article considers a variety of Citizens United documentaries and analyzes how the films employ traditional modes of documentary representation, a formal strategy, I argue, that provides a generic alibi for the films’ otherwise polemical discourse, specifically the films’ expression of a uniformly conservative, neo-liberal ideology. Regardless of their respective subjective matter—immigration, energy, abortion, health care, cultural history, etc.—the oeuvre of Citizens United films expresses a consistent set of conservative political ideas and talking points. Self-explanatory and affirmative titles include Rediscovering God in America (Kevin Mitchell, 2008) and Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny (Ken Knoblock, 2009), but the films more typically take antagonistic positions against progressive institutions and politicians, including such films as Broken Promises: The United Nations at 60 (Kevin Knoblock, 2005), ACLU: At War with America (David N. Bossie, 2006), and Hype: The Obama Effect (Alan Peterson, 2008), among over a dozen others. As a collection, the films reiterate what Jeffrey P. Jones identifies as the “standard ideological tenets of contemporary conservatism” valorized on such other media outlets as talk-radio and Fox News: “militaristic patriotism, patriarchal gender norms, conservative cultural ‘values,’ Christian religiosity, Second Amendment rights, and free market capitalism, [and also the denigration of] government, immigrants, liberals, labor unions, and non-Christian religions.” [2] The ideological content of the Citizens United films reproduce without significant qualification these conservative tenets. The more striking feature of the films, then, concerns the formal manifestation of these ideas on-screen. To call the films “documentaries,” after all, is too generous an application of the term; the films resemble something more like television attack ads stretched to feature length. This extended duration, matched with the simplistic, almost automatic repetition of conservative tenets produces an aesthetic dilemma: how to fill time and (visual) space in pseudo-documentaries that include little historical research and which rely primarily on didactic interviews with conservative pundits and Republican officials? Citizens United films appear to solve this problem by relying on stock footage—video clips professionally produced for licensing purposes—as visual illustrations of and even ostensible confirmations for their political arguments. Even when they appropriate newsreels, newspaper clippings, or other archival materials to illustrate historical narratives and political talking-points, Citizens United films demonstrate an overriding stock logic: the transformation of visual evidence into generic, paradigmatic images.