Documentary Resistance: The Stories of “We Tell” as Collective Political Agency Angela J. Aguayo It’s for the people to become aware of what this is all about. This is why I like this idea about film is that people can get to know more about that and see things, you know. People have to stand up and demand. They have a right to demand that judicial procedure be carried out in the right manner. —Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information, Black Panther Party History is filled with examples of community-centered me- dia makers utilizing documentary to challenge injustice while simultaneously envisioning a new world. In 1909, fifty years after the end of slavery, Booker T. Washington commissioned his first documentary, projecting new images of a free and self-determining African American work- ing class on community screens across the nation. In the 1930s, workers risked financial destitution and their own safety to document collective responses to abusive working conditions. 1 The story of democracy’ s survival in the United States is one of participatory community media, of people unwilling to give up on the dream of an inclusive society, facilitating democratic exchange with media practices, generating col- lective experiments, and harnessing the production process to represent their demands for a better world. “We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media” is an impor- tant retrospective of documentary media projects produced by embattled communities attempting to address problems too often excluded from larger public concern and a limited, monopolistic film and television industry. Coprogrammed by Louis Massiah and Patricia R. Zimmermann, with archi- val assistance from the XFR Collective, “We Tell” dives into more than fifty years of media as developed by physical com- munities with a shared political vision and a focus on advo- cacy to shift power in the public commons. In the 1970s, women were dying from acts of domestic vi- olence and suffering from sustained abuse in the supposed safety of their own homes. This led women to pick up film cameras and demand a new vision for women’ s health and security within their community. In the 1990s, antiwar acti- vists used cameras to explain their contentious objections to an unjust Iraq war. In these examples of documentary resis- tance that began with a refusal of consent and compliance, activist filmmakers set limits on the authority of others by demonstrating the power inherent in the “physical failure to adapt one’ s behaviour to the demands of the state, of the law and of capital.” 2 Participatory community media in the United States tells a story of self-determination and bears witness to the long and treacherous roads of resistance that people will travel to achieve these ends. To be sure, “We Tell” is a massive project. This national traveling exhibition includes forty media projects produced by thirty-six nonprofit community organizations and cul- tural centers. When remembering community media from the past fifty years, the cultural hubs on the coasts usually take center stage. The “We Tell” exhibition expands this scope to include work from New Orleans, Chicago, and Kentucky—also vibrant spaces for community media. From the first audiovisual testimonies of domestic violence to strik- ing images of direct action in the fight over sovereignty of in- digenous lands, this documentation of the collective joys and pains of negotiating an inclusive democracy becomes a vital visual record of public life in the United States. Shockingly, many of the works included in the series were on the verge of being lost from the archive and disregarded as nonessential works of history, deemed too unimportant to systematically preserve. Highlighting the complexities of preservation, this history of microbudget community films wends its way through a tremendous arc of technological de- velopment, from 16mm to half-inch Portapak to videocas- sette to cable-access television shows to satellite transmission and on up to today’ s digital video, mobile phones, online networks, and drone photography. As recording and broad- cast formats shift, so does the ability to effectively preserve participatory community media: stories are continuously lost on deteriorating film and disintegrating tape, left to age in storage closets, or to nearly vanish on hard drives. 82 SUMMER 2020 Film Quarterly, Vol. 73, Number 4, pp. 82–88, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. © 2020 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/FQ.2020.73.4.82. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-pdf/73/4/82/402894/fq_73_4_82.pdf by guest on 26 June 2020