They point out that we no longer teach any courses in radio, though the department began as a subset of theatre concerned with radio dramatic writing and producing. However almost all of my colleagues consistently ridicule “radio” when making the case for changing the department name to “media studies” or “visual cultures” or whatever. Personally I think names are fairly irrelevant terms of convenience, and the “politics of naming” is as silly as arguing a point from etymology. I have a personal investment here because my own academic department, Radio, Television, and Film at Northwestern University, has long talked of changing its name. So, appropriate technology contributes to timely project completion, imaginative investigation, and intimate storytelling. The learning curve for training in video and the nature of the equipment would have made this project much harder, more expensive, and complicated in that technology. The inconspicuous nature of cassette recorders, and the relative simplicity of use for recording allowed them to gather information, interview people they knew such as their teacher, and also gain entry to a downtown hotel and interview a basketball star from a visiting team. They kept audio diaries and two weeks later the collected work was edited by them, along with professional sound editors, into the final version. It was produced by giving the boys portable cassette tape recorders, quality mikes, and training them. This 30 minute piece is a wonderful “view from inside” that gives us a portrait of a community by revealing the two makers as they construct an audio diary. To dramatize this and tease you, let me play the opening of an award winning 1993 audio documentary, Ghetto Life 101, recorded by two young teenagers living in Chicago: The third thing I want to do is give you an example of what audio documentary can do which in many cases makes it better - yes, I said better - than visual documentary. That leads to the second thing I want to do, which is to celebrate audio documentary today, and to give you an overview of what’s happening. OR to put it in positive terms, I want to make people aware of what is already going on. One is to scold Visible Evidence participants for being ignorant of or avoiding thinking actively about audio documentary. So, I want to do three things this morning. My specific concern with this paper is to convince everyone that audio documentary is fully worthy of study both in conjunction with visual documentary, that is as part of audiovisual work, and in its own right as a form that bears very strong resemblances to the aesthetic and practical issues of visual documentary, especially in its cinema and video forms. Yet we both thought it was an important part of the documentary tradition and experience, and, full story be told, that audio recording precedes cinematic recording. This panel began with a conversation between Derek Paget and myself at the last Visible Evidence conference about how especially, with the rise of visual culture studies, audio was being lost track of. Those of you who were able to attend the Monday afternoon workshop on community based media organizing, as well as yesterday afternoon’s panel on socially committed work, will see many connections to what I’m saying here. Tom, this is a terrific tribute to the long history of the Visible Evidence conferences. I want to personally thank the organizers of the conference for a wonderful event, so thoughtfully and industriously organized. This is a presentation I made at the 12th Visible Evidence Conference in Montreal in August 2005 on a panel I co-chaired with Derek Paget titled, “Listen Up! The Sound of Documentary.” I’ve decided to keep the spoken word tone and rhetoric for print publication because it conveys a key point about audio/oral delivery. Audio documentary by Chuck Kleinhans, text versionĢ006, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
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