EllenPall.com - JOURNALISM

Video Verite

by Ellen Pall

from The New York Times Education Life Supplement, January 3, 1999, Sunday

THE YOUNG WOMAN ON THE TELEvision screen simply will not look up.
''When this documentary was first to the floor, ''I was having doubts about it. It was like I was trying to block out certain memories of my father, just block him out entirely.''

The camera shifts to a close-up, but the young woman's eyes don't move. Her face is thin and tense. ''I knew right then and there that I would have to face issues that were in my past once again,'' she says grimly. ''And this time, hopefully, get through them.''

The woman's name is LaToya Aultman, and the interview with her appears just after the documentary's title, ''AWOL From the Father 'Hood': Are Fathers Necessary Anymore?'' Made a year ago by Ms. Aultman, now 21, and five other high-school students at the Educational Video Center on the East Side of Manhattan, ''AWOL'' intercuts interviews with experts on parental roles; fantasy encounters with missing dads; statistics on fatherlessness and suicide, fatherlessness and divorce and fatherlessness and teen-age pregnancy, and even a segment from a documentary on how father penguins nurture their young.

The editing is fast and often funny, but in the end, the effect is crushing: what at first appeared to be a rehtorical subtitle has been painfully answered. Five of the six young filmmakers grew up in fatherless homes.

Unusual as it is, ''AWOL'' is a typical product of the Educational Video Center - a short documentary that connects s subject of compelling personal importance for its makers to the public issues and institutions that surround it. The center is a nonprofit organization currently housed in the School for the Physical City, an alternative high school and middle school on East 25th Street; it teaches the art of making video documentaries to students from public high schools all over New York City.

Each semester, 25 students are chosen from a pool of applicants recommended by school counselors. Because the center has been successful with students who are at risk of failing or dropping out of school - often bright students sidetracked by emotional problems or difficulties at home - counselors often refer those with troubled histories. The center looks particularly for evidence of enthusiasm and creativity in its candidates' applications. It does not exclude affluent students, but it does seek out youths from poor neighborhoods and schools without the resources to offer video training.

The chosen ones spend afternoons at the center for five months. Some students continue with an advanced class, and some eventually become part of Youth Organizing-TV, or YO-TV, which makes documentaries for museums and other institutions for small stipends. This fall, the YO-TV crew prepared videos for the New Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The center also trains teachers in 25 city schools on how to use video and how to teach students to interpret media.

In the 14 years since its founding, the center has built up a large library of tapes, including ''Young Gunz,'' about why teen-agers carry guns; ''Unequal Education,'' an expose of the uneven allocation of resources in two neighboring schools, and ''Blacks and Jews: Are They Really Sworn Enemies?'' Some of the videos have been broadcast on national television, notably as part of Bill Moyers's ''Listening to America'' series on public television. Dozens have won awards.

''Video documentary enables students to bear witness to their social conditions and look for solutions,'' says Steven Gooman, the center's founder and executive director. ''It empowers kids to see themselves in context, to communicate to others how that feels.'' And, he adds, making a tape by ''working together democratically, they learn a powerful way to learn.''

At the same time, students examine how the electronic and print media work, learning to decode, analyse and interpret the sound-and-image language of electronic communication.

Such an understanding of media language is crucial in today's world of videos, CD's, CD-ROM's, megabudget movies and advertising, says mary Megee, a media eduator and author of a series of documentaries about television. She praises the center's method of combining hands-on learning with classroom studies.

''We live immersed in a sea of messages,'' she says. ''Other people's agendas confront us at every turn. To be effective participants in the public dialogue, young people have to learn to be critical receivers and capable senders of messages themselves.'' That kind of literacy is now as basic as reading and writing, she notes, because ''the literature of our time is television.''

ON A CHILLY OCTOBER AFTERNOON, four Educational Video Center interns troop over to nearby Madison Square Park to do some videotaping. They are making short video self-portraits that, along with the written biographies, story boards, notes and other ephemera that went into their creation, will be the raw material for an installation about media at the Brooklyn Museum on Jan. 9 and 10.

As the crew prepares equipment, Duwayne Philpotts, an 18-year-old senior at the Satellite Academy in the Bronx, slouches onto a bench in front of an empty playground to discuss his script for this scene. He has short cornrows, two diamond studs in his left ear and a bright, tender glance he seldom allows to show.

''Action,'' says Jason Garcia, today's cameraman. Duwayne lights up what looks like - but is not - a marijuana cigarette, and then spits on the pavement near his feet. He drags deeply, looks up into the camera and blows smoke at its lens. Jason, a loose, lanky 16-year-old, then pans across the park, while Joan Jubela, a professional filmmaker who teaches the workshop with another filmmaker, Jacqueline Dolly, fights a burning desire to direct them.

''We won't see the playground,'' she murmurs, noting that Jason is holding the camera so high above Duwayne that the face will exclude the interesting contrast of swings and slides behind him.

''There's a constant pull between process and product,'' she adds a bit ruefully as the crew moves on. Indeed, the center's holistic approach to teaching turns entirely on a process-product axis. The teachers want the finished documentaries to be accomplished - they may be important for job or college applications.

Yet the program is committed to keeping the focus on learning; instruction is given, but once the students are out in the field, they must solve problems on their own. Mistakes are considered intrinsic to learning, and the goal is the journey, not the end result.

''Teaching is to make documentaries has always been the thing that we do here,'' Mr. Goodman explains. ''But it's not the main point. the real point is the critical and creative skills learned along the way.''

All the same, as the crew approaches a demonstration that is taking place at the south end of the park, Ms. Jubela, foreseeing a wasted opportunity, can't help suggesting that they plan an itinerary before they plunge through the crowd. The crew pauses and confers. The demonstrators, mostly Albanian-Americans, are protesting the American policy in the Kosovo province in Serbia. They have chosen the park because of the association of Richard C. Holbrooke, the American envoy in the Balkans, with Credit Suisse, whose offices are across the street from the park. A sizable contingent of police is present to keep the peace. Serenely ignoring the purpose of the rally, Duwayne circles around so that he is in front of the police vans and uses the chanting behind him for background. He glances over his shouler.

Then he declares passionately to the camera, ''The police need to give us a break!''

Back inside, the crew reassebles in a long, locker-lined corridor outside the center's crowded fourth-floor office. After much fumbling, they adjust the camera for taping indoors. Duwayne wants to tape a T-shirt on which a photo of his close friend, Charlie, who drowned last summer while swimming in a lake at college, has been reproduced. When at last the camera is ready, he picks up the shirt and stands miserably fluttering it before his chest.

Later, Duwayne explains tha tcharlie was a member of his own ''crew'' in the Bronx, a tight group of friends who call themselves North Legacy. Duwayne speaks of North Legacy as his family - people who care about him, people he grew up with, hangs out with, plays music with - but to defend itself, the group is also capable of violence, he says.

''My crew?'' he says. ''We're not going to bully civilized people. But if you want to be tough toward us, try to make us feel intimidated, something's going to happen.''

Members of the center's staff are worried that Duwayne may drop out of the program. He is doing well at Satellite and is close to graduating, but his demeanor here is removed, indifferent. He rarely speaks and is often the first one out the door. Helping students change counterproductive habits is an important aspect of the center's work, and Ms. Dolly, a warm, lively Englishwoman who like Ms. Jubela has a graduate degree in creative writing, recently asked Duwayne to consider how his diffidence may affect his success.

''Do you think your tendency to maintain a distance will help you or hinder you?'' she wrote on one of his papers, advising, ''The more you make people notice you are here, the more they will respect you.''

But Duwayne is not inclined to drop his guard. ''You can't trust anybody,'' he says. ''I've had people talk behind my back, lie in my eyes.'' A writer of fierce, incisive rap lyrics, he states his policy in a song called ''I.C.U.''' ''I keep my ears open, trap shut.''

MR. GOODMAN, 41, LEARNED THE power of video documentary to change lives firsthand in the late 1970's. A history student at Columbia College, he set out to produce a work of social journalism about youth gangs in the South Bronx. But as he was finishing, a gang member whom he had been observing killed two teen-age girls. Mr. Goodman, who by then had enrolled in Columbia's journalism school, extended the project to follow the story into the justice system. Three years after he started, he hooked up a monitor on a street in the neighborhood where he had been taping and screened his finished work: 20 chilling minutes of black-and-white testimony on life and death in the neighborhood.

''One of the first things I learned from that was that video defamiliarizes the familiar,'' Mr. Goodman says. ''We tend to go through life almost being lulled into accepting our conditions. But there's something about video that captures life, reframes it, positions it. The residents themselves had been going to the fire hydrant to get water because there was no running water in their buildings. They lived it. But to see it on the video somehow made it more real. It was a transformative experience for them'' -- one that led to community action.

For Mr. Goodman, the project was also transformative. He began to want to put cameras into residents' hands so that they could tell their own stories. At this point, he says, ''Crossing the line from journalism to education seemed natural.'' In 1981, he began to teach video workshops at the Satellite Academy on the Lower East Side, a public high school serving students who are not succeeding elsewhere. The results, he says, were startling.

''Kids who had been traditionally truant started coming in early and staying late -- and winning awards,'' he says. ''Other teachers also wanted to learn.'' In 1984, with financing from the Cohn Foundation and the New York Community Trust, Mr. Goodman established the Educational Video Center as an independent entity that accepted students from all over the city. The center, which now receives some support from the New York City Board of Education, has an operating budget of about $800,000.

The center is part of a growing trend toward teaching media literacy, a catchall term that covers many different kinds of programs. Some focus on how to handle equipment as vocational training. Others aim to create critical consumers -- and capable citizens -- by teaching youths how to decode the thousands of images thrown at them daily by advertisements, television and the like. Some media educators abhor popular culture, some embrace it.

Either way, Mr. Goodman says, the language of such a powerful force needs to be taught.

''It makes a difference whether something is shot as a close-up or a wide angle, what's in the camera frame, what's left out,'' he says. ''Kids grow up watching TV, videos, films, computers, CD-ROM's, and all sorts of learning takes place, from infancy on, in an informal way. But rarely do they get the opportunity to be either producers of their own media using this language or critical analysts of it.''

As in other media literacy programs, the students learn to analyze the language of image and sound, just as they read and analyze books in English classes. Is the man in the whisky ad twice as big as the woman? Is the woman actually cut in half at the edge of the picture? What does that say about men? About women? About whisky?

The subtler manipulations and biases found in entertainment and news media are also scrutinized, the same way a history textbook may be examined for slants and omissions, or a poem dismantled to find out how it was constructed. What effect does a rock song on the soundtrack have while a robbery is occurring in a film? Does it suggest that crime is hip and exciting? Why doesn't the camera stay with the security guard in an action movie after the explosion blasts him through the plate-glass window? Perhaps the death of ordinary people is not interesting or important?

According to national studies, the average child between 8 and 17 years old watches 1,100 to 1,600 hours of television every year but spends fewer than 1,000 hours in school. The Center for Media Education in Washington reports that the only thing children in this age group do more than watch television is sleep. Yet only 11 states require media literacy instruction. (New York is not among them.)

If the Educational Video Center is part of the media literacy movement, it also draws on the progressive methodology known as student-centered learning, which stresses a hands-on approach, collaborative group work and a connection with the larger community. Videos are framed around community issues like schooling, pollution, race relations and drug abuse and are rented by schools and other institutions around the world.

Kathleen Tyner, a media theorist and the author of the 1998 book ''Literacy in a Digital World'' (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), considers the center and similar programs to be pioneers.

''Schooling has always been so associated with alphabetic literacy,'' Ms. Tyner says, adding that the center and others like it ''have crossed the threshold into electronic and digital forms of communication in schooling.''

She continues: ''We know that children learn best when they start with their home culture, with the things they know. And the thing they know very well is electronic communication. It's very important that children learn to read and write in print. But why not use all the literacy tools at our disposal to broaden children's ways of interacting with the world?''

The documentary workshops are mixed groups in every way. Some interns are high achievers bent on media careers. Others are ''super seniors,'' in high school too long yet unable to graduate. In this fall workshop, one student is a born-again Pentecostal Christian struggling to leave behind a history of truancy, cursing, provocative dress and sex. Another arrived from El Salvador at age 13 speaking no English but has earned enough credits to finish high school in three years. Jason Garcia has a growing career as a model and actor. Duwayne Philpotts may move with a tough crew, but he spent last summer working in a day-care center, and his television tastes include ''Frasier'' and ''Seinfeld.''

One day in late October, he sits with a fellow student, Aram Zadikian, 17, at one of the two editing machines in the center's windowless work space. Idle equipment is piled in one corner, coats are strewn everywhere, and it is nearly impossible to cross the room without stepping on someone or tripping over something.

Aram, whose father, Zadik, is a sculptor, is working as Duwayne's editor on his self-portrait. In his spare time, Aram and a friend are making an action comedy-drama pilot, which they hope to land on television. Like most of the boys in the class, Aram wears an earring and seems permanently attached to his headgear -- in his case, a knitted terra-cotta-colored cap. He and Duwayne work first on the brief scene of the rippling T-shirt, choosing a segment and adding the narration.

''At times I start to think about my right-hand man, Charlie, who passed away,'' says Duwayne in a deep, deliberate voice-over. ''But then I have to realize life goes on, and I learned that life has to be serious.''

At the monitor, Aram clicks on a window containing a still picture from the Kosovo protest, and the two review tape of that event. When they arrive at Duwayne's declaration, ''The police need to give us a break!'' Duwayne asks Aram to isolate the glance that he took over his shoulder just before speaking and to triple it, so that he seems to whip his head back and forth three times in a row. Duwayne has never made a video before, but he has been thinking about television lately, watching it differently (he watches about 16 hours a week, he says), noticing how images can reinforce ideas.

He wants the triple glance to look, he explains, ''like I'm scared to say it.''

A week later, Duwayne turns up two hours early for class. Hanging out in the hallway, he mentions that he hopes to make a career in the music or video industry. The documentary workshop is good preparation, he adds, not only because of the technical skills it provides but also because it is teaching him how to work with new people.

''Because no matter what you're going to do, you're going to have to work with people,'' he observes. ''Outside your race, gay, straight, whatever. So you learn a lot.''

LaToya Aultman, the young woman who helped to create ''AWOL,'' also says she learned a lot in the workshop. She was, she says, a ''loose wire'' when she arrived at the center in 1997, impatient and confused. But Ms. Dolly worked closely with her, shepherding her through the making of ''AWOL'' and gently encouraging her to risk shedding her volatile persona. These days, after returning to the center for the advanced workshop and then joining the YO-TV crew, Ms. Aultman is virtually unrecognizable as the tormented teen-ager in the ''AWOL'' tape. She has a swift stride, a huge, brilliant smile and college plans.

''In the school system, some of the kids get lost,'' Ms. Dolly says. ''No one pays any attention to them. We have the luxury of being able to do that here.''

In early November, the workshop interns view and criticize one another's self-portraits. In several, an artistic eye has already started to assert itself. Zoe Friedman, 17, a politically inclined student who cultivates a retro-hippie look, uses a plume of steam rising from a manhole on Madison Avenue to match the musing tone of her narration. Edward Griffith, 17, recalling his struggle to fit in and survive high school, shows himself shoved, and then slammed, into a locker.

In 17-year-old Gina Sullivan's self-portrait, her perky voice-over chirps, ''You could describe me as an outgoing person,'' while her image is replaced by Judy Garland as Dorothy skipping down the road to Oz.

Duwayne watches his own video with the others. ''Hello, my name is Duwayne,'' it begins. ''I consider myself to be quiet and calm and normally don't come out of my character for anybody.''

The tape draws praise for its honesty and its match of words to image. Duwayne smiles. He is still hanging out with the teachers when class ends at 4.

ABC's for the Information Age

To navigate the sea of information flooding into our homes, today's youths need to learn to ''read''

and ''write'' a whole new language of sound, image, text and data bits. Mary Megee, the producer and writer of the ''On Television'' documentaries for PBS and the former director of the Media Education Laboratory at Rutgers University, offers approaches to decoding and judging messages as well as creating and sending your own:

COUNT THE CUTS: Every second of video contains 30 frames, some of which may evoke an unconscious memory or feeling. Record a commercial and play it several times, noting how the images change with each ''cut'' or ''dissolve.'' If an advertiser pays $1 million to place a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl, each of the 900 frames costs $1,111. What's the possibility that any single image is incidental?

HOLD A CRITICS' CAUCUS: Examine and discuss a music video in terms of religion, politics, health, finance and international relations. Consider symbols, costumes, effects and lyrics.

FIND IMPLIED MEANINGS: In a beer ad, the hero feigns lasciviousness as tall, slim blond women surround him. Are there clues to the women's professions? Does beer make them slender? Is thinness crucial for beauty or for self-worth? Will drinking enhance the man's popularity, wit or prowess?

LISTEN AND SEE: As accompaniment to a car chase in an action film, Mozart's ''Requiem'' suggests doom; rock music suggests fun. With eyes closed, ''read'' a story through music, dialogue, inflection, pace, tone and even pauses. Watch without sound and compare.

ANALYZE MOTIVES: In any medium, consider the interests -- financial, public-service, artistic, political, advocatory -- of those presenting the information. Who is telling or selling what to whom, for what purpose, on behalf of which interests and with what effect?

In a newspaper, who decides what is news and the order in which stories appear? Consider emotion-laden terms, unattributed statements, relationship of pictures to words, use of nicknames versus names and titles and the apparent significance of the lead story.

On local television, why would a crime piece run longer than a piece on telephone company mergers? On network news, why does the opposite usually hold true?

On the Internet, some companies with Web sites solicit demographic information, praising those who answer and ridiculing those who don't. How would you advise young people to navigate such sites?

GET INVOLVED: Because digital will soon supplant analog television, Congress is writing new communications policies for economic, technological and public-interest standards. To participate in this process, viewers and media-makers need to understand their information options and rights. Only broadcast television -- not cable -- is required to serve the ''public interest, convenience and necessity,'' as stated in the Communications Act of 1934, and provide at least three hours of educational programming a week. Should future decisions maintain or eliminate these provisions, or those for noncommercial television and radio? Which policies best serve the public interest rather than private interests? Will everyone have equal access?

MASTER THE TOOLS: Becoming media literate entails producing and sharing ideas through all available media.