MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This paper recounts and reflects on the process of documenting the last two years of legendary folk musician Pete Seeger’s local activism in the town of Beacon, New York. In the fall of 2012 while archiving images for our film, Down by the Riverside, Pete pulled my partner and me aside and said, “The power of your film will depend on its artistic merit.” As a songwriter and performer who was at the forefront of Civil Rights, the labor struggle, and the environmental and peace movements, Seeger knew intimately of the power of artistic expression to build solidarity and encourage collective action; yet, we were still surprised that this was the first and only piece of advice that he gave us about the film. We had expected him to be concerned with the message, not the aesthetic. Seeger’s caveat highlights an important tension at the core of activist filmmaking between creating art and evincing change.

Film scholarship is deeply informed by auteur theory, but little work has explored the distinctive role of the documentary filmmaker as auteur and more specifically the ways in which documenting activism complicates the traditional rendering of the auteur. In activist filmmaking, the auteur does not control the action but instead orders it. Becoming part of the movement while remaining outside of it, existing as outsider/insider artist both in and outside of the activist landscape, the activist-auteur then thrives in a liminal position between immersion and detachment, creating narrative while participating in it. This paper defines the activist film, the activist-auteur and employs a theoretical and pragmatic framework for understanding the relationship between art and activism in documentary filmmaking.