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The Rodney King Case, or Moving Testimony

Louis-Georges Schwartz

in Mechanical Witness: A History of Motion Picture Evidence in U.S. Courts

The chapter analyzes the Rodney King tape's use as motion picture evidence and as television footage. The analysis reveals differences in the function of evidence within the two institutions.

Introduction: After 100 Years of Evidentiary Film and Video

Louis-Georges Schwartz

in Mechanical Witness: A History of Motion Picture Evidence in U.S. Courts

Chapter 1 summarizes the book and examines the Society for Cinema Studies Resolution on the Rodney King case.

Temporality and Surveillance II: Surveillance, Remediation, and Social Memory in Strange Days

Catherine Zimmer

in Surveillance Cinema

The final chapter provides detailed analysis of the1995 film Strange Days, which historically reframes the discussion of temporality in surveillance narratives and surveillance practice. The film ... More

The final chapter provides detailed analysis of the1995 film Strange Days, which historically reframes the discussion of temporality in surveillance narratives and surveillance practice. The film works around and through the entangled racial tensions and media landscape of the 1990s, most fully represented by its visual and narrative references to the videotaped police assault on Rodney King. Bringing together this mise-en-scène of historicized racial violence with a science-fictional virtual reality fantasy, Strange Days represents a media and surveillance culture on the cusp of digitization, serving as a form of what certain new media theorists have conceptualized as “remediation.” The reading of the film in this chapter suggests that it is through such remediation that resistant politics might be located in the cinematic narration of surveillance, in part by redefining circularity and repetition. The chapter concludes with the point that “surveillance cinema” necessarily makes clear not just the contiguities but also the inconsistencies between the ideological premises of surveillance and the demands of narrative form, and thus cinema can be seen, even as it functions alongside other surveillance formations, as a point of access to the often failed performances of surveillant power.Less

Multiplicity and Collective Contestation in the 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Rebellion

Sina Kramer

in Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors

Chapter 7 takes up the political unintelligibility of the 1992 Los Angeles (LA) Riot/Rebellion to understand—if not why the riots remain unintelligible to us as political contestation of political ... More

Chapter 7 takes up the political unintelligibility of the 1992 Los Angeles (LA) Riot/Rebellion to understand—if not why the riots remain unintelligible to us as political contestation of political conditions—how this unintelligibility is produced and what significance it bears for us now. While riots (and race riots in particular) might be politically intelligible under certain conditions, the consolidation of anti-Black racism with riots throughout the latter twentieth century rendered “America’s first multiracial riot” particularly unintelligible as a political contestation of constitutive exclusion. I discuss the interrelation of gender, class, and sexuality in the Rodney King beating, the murder of Latasha Harlins, and the multiracial geography of the riots to articulate how the continued unintelligibility of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot/Rebellion, as well as contemporary riots, constitute political agency now.Less

Truth, Lies, and Meaning in Slow Motion Images

Sheena Rogers

in Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies

Slow motion images in film and video are often thought to truthfully represent events in the real world, hence they are used in action replays and courts of law as evidence. While such films preserve ... More

Slow motion images in film and video are often thought to truthfully represent events in the real world, hence they are used in action replays and courts of law as evidence. While such films preserve information about what, who, where and how often, a close look at a variety of film and video images and empirical work from the author’s laboratory demonstrate that some properties of the physical world are transformed. These transformations could be considered lies in some contexts but they can also be the basis of powerful aesthetic experiences when used artfully in film. This chapter’s three level framework of image meaning is used to organize possible psychological responses to slow motion images.Less

The Sound of the Fury: The Olympic City through the Prism of Black Atlanta’s Expressive Culture

Maurice J. Hobson

in The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta

Chapter six focuses on Mayor Maynard Jackson’s creation of the City of Atlanta’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs, the first institution within city government dedicated to the support of artists, their ... More

Chapter six focuses on Mayor Maynard Jackson’s creation of the City of Atlanta’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs, the first institution within city government dedicated to the support of artists, their creative expressions and arts organizations. The goal of the Bureau was to make all forms of art—established and experimental—more accessible to Atlanta’s citizens. The Bureau empowered a multitude of artists and arts organizations through city funded grants and broke new ground in stabling a niche for black musical genres such as jazz and classical music as well as alternative films. This set the stage for Atlanta to boom in terms of black popular culture, as Jackson’s black political power yielded an expressive arm, a black arts movement unique to Atlanta, making it ripe for popular culture to be spewed and accessed critically. “Dirty South” rap music evolved out of this black arts movement, and opened black Atlanta to social commentary from a new generation of artists that lived in the underbelly trampled over by Atlanta’s pursuit of a global commercial center. This counter-narrative and demonstration, gave a southern perspective of popular culture spewed and assessed critically in the city. It was grounded in Hip-hop and centered on this particular sector of youth culture, the meanings and significance of a recently self-defined southern–style of rap and Hip-hop culture and was established and promoted by Organized Noize’s OutKast and Goodie Mob, rap groups hailing from Atlanta’s Southwest side. Their music imbibed an aesthetic that was particular to the South in general and Atlanta in particular but was consumed by markets nationwide. In this music, artists call out Atlanta’s black politicians and their governing practices. Using popular culture from Atlanta provides a useful scope through which to view the lingering tensions and trends that were particular to Atlanta as a result of the “Olympification” of the city.Less

Plotting Justice

Jennifer Harford Vargas

in Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel

This chapter explores how the novel can plot out fantasies of justice, using Héctor Tobar’s novel The Tattooed Soldier to demonstrate how the novel can challenge mass impunity in the Americas. The ... More

This chapter explores how the novel can plot out fantasies of justice, using Héctor Tobar’s novel The Tattooed Soldier to demonstrate how the novel can challenge mass impunity in the Americas. The novel’s protagonist takes advantage of the chaos of the Rodney King uprisings in Los Angles to shoot and kill the Guatemalan military soldier who murdered his wife and son and who received counterinsurgency training at the United States’ School of the Americas. These diverse acts of rage against institutionalized impunity are comparatively illuminated in the novel via intersecting plot lines, rotating points of view, disruptive flashbacks, iterative events, and shifting geographies. The chapter further unpacks the political and formal valences of plot, arguing that the novel’s structure is at odds with the two main protagonists’ narrative desires. Though the novel’s revenge plot is resolved, the novel does not resolve the larger plot for justice; the chapter ends by considering alternative means of generating social transformation and attaining justice.Less

Candyman: Production and Reception

Jon Towlson

in Candyman

This chapter provides a background of the production and reception of Candyman (1992). It begins by looking at the casting of Tony Todd for the Candyman role, as well as the casting of Virginia ... More

This chapter provides a background of the production and reception of Candyman (1992). It begins by looking at the casting of Tony Todd for the Candyman role, as well as the casting of Virginia Madsen for the role of Helen Lyle. The chapter then details the filming of Candyman in the real Cabrini-Green housing project. The producers worked closely with the residents' association and employed Cabrini-Green youths to act in the film, which also served to help the production's credibility with the residents. Finally, the chapter details how the theatrical release of Candyman came at a time of great racial tension in Los Angeles. According to Bernard Rose, Candyman had a test screening scheduled on the day that the Rodney King riots broke out; this would mark the screening as taking place in April of 1992, several months before Candyman's US theatrical release in October. As Clive Barker has remarked, there was genuine fear amongst the movie executives that, in the aftermath of the riots, the film would be seen as racist.Less

Rodney King’s Revenge

Nona Willis Aronowitz

in The Essential Ellen Willis

This chapter focuses on the trial of O. J. Simpson, who was accused of two counts of murder in relation to the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and waiter Ronald Lyle Goldman. Simpson’s ... More

This chapter focuses on the trial of O. J. Simpson, who was accused of two counts of murder in relation to the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and waiter Ronald Lyle Goldman. Simpson’s history of violence against Nicole was damning, even without the evidence Judge Lance Ito had disallowed. There was simply too much physical evidence to be entirely invalidated by the bungling that had surrounded its collection. In the end, however, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The Rodney King case was the wrong gird to lay on O. J. Simpson, but it’s wrong to equate the verdict with the South’s old habit of routinely acquitting whites who committed crimes against blacks. The jury in the O. J. Simpson case did not act out of animus toward the victims because of their race, or Nicole because of her sex; it didn’t imply that their deaths were a good thing for the social order; it simply ignored them.Less

After the Unrest: Ten Years of Rebuilding Los Angeles following the Trauma of 1992

William Fulton

in The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster

It is always difficult to measure urban resilience, but never more so when the trauma results from civil unrest, as opposed to a natural disaster or enemy attack.With natural disasters, it is ... More

It is always difficult to measure urban resilience, but never more so when the trauma results from civil unrest, as opposed to a natural disaster or enemy attack.With natural disasters, it is frequently difficult to place blame, even if “acts of God” are sometimes all too intertwined with ill-advised decisions to site buildings in vulnerable areas. Wars and other attacks usually entail clear enemies, and eventually come to some negotiated halt, accompanied by greater territorial clarity. With riots and civil unrest, by contrast, destruction is community-based. Victims and perpetrators live in close proximity; violence is often inflicted within the very neighborhoods that feel most aggrieved; and recovery entails the need to redress not just physical damage but also deeply ingrained mistrust. Rebuilding, in this sense, requires not just investment in real estate, but also a variety of human capital—local infusions of community dynamism, neighborly cooperation, and no small measure of hope. In the United States, Los Angeles, California, stands out as the site of two generations of civil unrest: the Watts riots of 1965 and the civil unrest of 1992. The 1992 disturbance was the most damaging urban riot in American history, killing fifty-four people and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage. Touched off by the acquittal on April 29 of white police officers accused of beating black motorist Rodney King, the rampage lasted several days and spread to an area much larger than the earlier riots in Watts. The disturbance ranged across dozens of square miles, mostly along the lengthy commercial strips in the southern part of the city of Los Angeles, including many areas not traditionally viewed as part of South Central. It even spilled northward above the Santa Monica Freeway into Hollywood, the traditionally Jewish Fairfax district, and other neighborhoods far from the traditional centers of African-American residence. This chapter investigates a full decade of efforts to rebuild South Central Los Angeles, following the trial of King’s assailants. In so many ways, Los Angeles is a city like no other—a vast but low-rise city, dense and sprawling at the same time. Auto-oriented and generally without high-rises, Los Angeles might seem different from a more traditional metropolis such as New York. Less

The Bodhisattva’s Practice of Enlightenment

Dale S. Wright

in What Is Buddhist Enlightenment?

“The Bodhisattva’s Practice of Enlightenment” interprets a Los Angeles Times newspaper opinion piece by Thich Nhat Hanh as a contemporary image of enlightenment with far-reaching implications. ... More

“The Bodhisattva’s Practice of Enlightenment” interprets a Los Angeles Times newspaper opinion piece by Thich Nhat Hanh as a contemporary image of enlightenment with far-reaching implications. Written in response to the brutal police beating of Rodney King and not intended for a Buddhist audience, this brief newspaper article nevertheless provides glimpses into the contemporary meaning of enlightenment. The chapter considers Thich Nhat Hanh’s comments in relation to the basic principles of Buddhist ethics before turning to the Vimalakīrti sūtra, a classical Mahayana Buddhist scripture, to extend an understanding of what it would mean to experience the world through an in-depth awareness of “no-self.” Dwelling on the bodhisattva’s effort to cultivate generosity of spirit, the chapter considers the kinds of human relations that Thich Nhat Hanh’s sense of enlightenment entails.Less

Epilogue

Allissa V. Richardson

in Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism

The book’s epilogue outlines the major legislative advances inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and the strides made by the 15 activists in the two-to-three years that followed their initial ... More

The book’s epilogue outlines the major legislative advances inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and the strides made by the 15 activists in the two-to-three years that followed their initial interviews in 2016 and 2017.Less

Coda: 2020 Vision

Noah Tsika

in Screening the Police: Film and Law Enforcement in the United States

Interrogating the entwinement of Hollywood and law enforcement means reconsidering standard definitions of the corporate media system. Scholars continue to view that system—typified, in conventional ... More

Interrogating the entwinement of Hollywood and law enforcement means reconsidering standard definitions of the corporate media system. Scholars continue to view that system—typified, in conventional accounts, by the Hollywood studios—as largely independent of state power. Police participation—broadly defined—has always saved the industry money, with state and municipal agencies funneling their own resources into principal photography, postproduction, and promotion. Tie-ups between police departments and film companies, which are constant rather than occasional—standard rather than exceptional—thus illustrate the rarely acknowledged reality that Hollywood is, in fact, publicly subsidized. Tax credits tempt filmmakers to far-flung locations where law enforcement agencies do their part to keep production costs down, sustaining Hollywood by public subsidy—a sort of “socialism for the rich.” Put simply, the police labor that is so frequently subsumed under Foucauldian abstractions has long been a key factor in the public funding of Hollywood.Less