Revolution Televised.pdf

Was the Revolution Televised? 39
ing and the looting, the shooting and the beating, went on for nearly
a week.
The sound bites of the black residents immediately follow this segment
and illustrate that many of them are upset at police brutality.
However, their comments are undermined by the narrator’s following
statement about the mobs attacking not only the police but
also firemen attempting to put out the blazes. And as the narrator
states, “The mobs hated authority, but more generally, they hated
all whites.”
Although African American “actors” within the text are often
intentionally used for the aforementioned dramatic and dangerous
effect, there are moments of “documentary excess.” 31 Documentary
theorist Bill Nichols suggests that
the impossibility of perfect congruence between text and history
stems from the impasse between discourse and referent, between the
signification of things and things signified. Representation serves to
bridge that divide, however imperfectly, self-consciously, or illusionistically.
Explanation, like ideology, provides strategies of containment
designed to account for historical reality. . . . In every case,
excess remains. 32
The excess of this documentary lies within the uncontainable acts of
the Watts residents, who do not comply with the narrative structure
of the documentarians. The narrative structure clearly shows a balance
in the information presented, which highlights the relevance
of the white authority figures over that of the black interviewees
from the Watts community. However, in a few instances the black
citizens of Watts move beyond the attempted containment of the
narrators. They are then able to put the politics of the community
into the public arena of television.
The clearest example of this within the documentary is a reporter’s
interview with a black female resident of the city. This woman
has four children and no husband in the home, a typical Moynihan
report case. The reporter talks about all of the welfare programs,
suggesting that there should be no need to riot. The woman will not
be assuaged by his suggestions and repeatedly insists, “I’d be proud
to go to work.” A crowd begins to gather around the reporter, who
continues to remind them of all that is provided by the welfare
programs. The crowd’s frustration is clear, and a man stares at the