| We Can't Reach You, Hartford |
 An investigative history of the Hartford Circus Fire of July 6th, 1944. Nominated for a Fringe First at the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. |
| Daguerreotype |
| In the twilight of his life, famed photographer Matthew Brady must choose between the life he has built and the legacy he wants to leave behind. |
| Tone Clusters |
| Renowned prose author Joyce Carol Oates explores honesty, perspective, and denial through one couple's harrowing attempt to save the person they love |
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| Friday, July 06, 2007 |
| Ecstatic Truth |
On Slate today is an interesting article about how Werner Herzog handles the truth. As a maker of both feature films and documentaries (as well as being one crazy motherfucker), Herzog says he believes is something called “ecstatic truth,” a truth which goes beyond the factual—what Herzog calls "a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants"—and into a realm where a film can illuminate an entire inner world rather than merely reproduce external realities. Re place the word “film” with “theater” and you must just be talking about what we do here at The American Story Project. Granted, in our search for ecstatic truth we’re nowhere near as ruthless as dear old Herzog (who treats his documentary subjects almost as if they’re actors—feeding them lines, creating fictitious childhood memories for them, staging moments and scenes that are made to look spontaneous), but I think our mentalities aren’t all that different.
Something I have always struggled with as a dramaturge, writer, and amateur historian is the nature of historical truth. It would make my beloved historiography professor cringe to hear (Ethan, if you’re reading this, close the window now) but I’ve always found historical truth so static and boring. Its always seemed incomplete in how self-contained and comprehensive it But it wasn’t until I was introduced to subalternity, the idea that for every historical voice we hear there is another voice being silenced, that there are some histories that we won’t find in any source material, that there are some histories that cannot be referenced, cited or documented, that I began to realize certain correlatives to historical truth: namely, fiction and imagination. And that’s what The American Story Project has been doing ever since.
I don’t know what Abraham Lincoln would have ever said to Mathew Brady. I know they were acquaintances who met on several occasions. I know that Lincoln was forever grateful for how Brady made the tall, gangly senator look “presidential.” But the historical record stops there. I’m the one who imagined two melancholic men, both deeply troubled in their own ways, talking about their wives. But that’s not to say it never happened, just that there’s no record of it happening. For all I know, I may have imagined the conversation exactly how it happened, word for word (unlikely, but these are the sorts of things I tell myself to keep going). But even if I didn’t, even if I got everything about their relationship wrong, it still feels right, it still feels true. I’m grasping at some ecstatic truth here, some truth about love, responsibility, and the anxieties of a Civil War America. I have imagined what could never be otherwise; I have completed a history of Mathew Brady that feels true to me because it is not bound by what we know to be true. I try to be honest, but I am not afraid to devise, exaggerate, and invent those things I cannot know. Even though I'm still a stickler for historical accuracy (just ask Jess) I have broken every rule I was taught to follow as a historian. And yet, I'm still writing histories. Ecstatic histories. |
posted by stephen @ 12:31 AM  |
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