Article

Animation:
An Interdisciplinary Journal
Animation on Trial 6(3) 259–275
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/1746847711416568
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Karen Beckman
University of Pennsylvania, USA

Abstract
This article first considers Kota Ezawa’s video installation, The Simpson Verdict within the broader
context of the rising interest in animation on the contemporary art landscape. After exploring
three trends within this proliferation of artists’ animation – works that animate moments from film
history, works that animate ‘reality’, and works that use popular media such as cartoons, television
and video games as source material, this article examines the difference between Ezawa’s work,
which re-draws already overexposed live footage, and those documentaries that use animation as
a supplementary visual tool when live footage does not and/or could not exist.

Keywords
animated body, animated documentary, artists’ animation, courtroom drawing and cameras,
ethics of animation, failures of documentary, Kota Ezawa, OJ Simpson, remediation, The Simpson
Verdict

I Documentary, animation, and cinematic ‘tact’

The question at the heart of this special issue – how do animation and documentary relate to each
other? – serves as a useful lever with which to pry open for further contemplation some of the less
interrogated assumptions at the center of recent efforts to establish what cinema is and is not within
the context of digital media. To ask: ‘What is an animated documentary?’ alongside the question:
‘What is cinema?’ is to invite into the field of thought consideration of how we imagine the rela-
tionship of André Bazin’s modernist ‘cinema’ to ‘animation’ and ‘documentary’ as distinct realms
of moving images in their own right. Already, these questions are too large to answer fully in a
single article, not least because they invoke three terms – cinema, animation, and documentary –
that are never self-explanatory. And yet it is against the backdrop of contemporary debates about
the status of cinema that I wish to place my analysis of two animated documentary works.
Discussions of animation’s relationship to cinema often invoke spatial metaphors. Stanley
Cavell (1979: 167), for example, asserts that there is one ‘whole region of film’ which ‘explicitly
has nothing to do with projections of the real world – the region of animated cartoons’. Dudley
Andrew (2010: 42) has recently suggested that Bazin’s ‘aesthetic of discovery’ stands ‘at the
antipodes of a cinema of manipulation, including most animation and pure digital creation’.

Corresponding author:
Karen Beckman, 241 S. Melville Street, Philadelphia, PA 19139, USA.
Email: beckmank@sas.upenn.edu
260 Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6(3)

Rosalind Krauss (2005: 102), writing about William Kentridge’s animated work in conversation
with Cavell, argues that Kentridge is not working with ‘that subset of film called animation’, but
rather that ‘in Kentridge’s practice film animation is a support or ground for what takes place
within or on top of it, namely a type of drawing that is extremely reflexive about its own condition.’
And numerous other scholars have contemplated whether ‘animation’ sits inside of ‘cinema’, over-
laps with it, contains it, or merits a circle all of its own.
If these spatial metaphors highlight the general tendency of academic discourses to territorialize
the objects under discussion, especially hybrid objects, they also highlight a more specific phe-
nomenon, one in which the intersection of animation with both live action documentary and fiction
films, makes us think more carefully how images shape our relation to, belief in, and movement
through the world.1 When animation meets documentary, questions about movement (animation’s
‘core’ term) seem inseparably yoked to questions about realism, fact and belief (documentary’s
core terms). Among other things, then, this topic provides an interesting counterpoint to Tom
Gunning’s (2007) framing of increased attention to movement and animation (something film
theory undoubtedly needs) as a ‘move away from’ or corrective to the discourse’s overemphasis on
realism-related issues like indexicality.
In Bazin’s writing, the place and meaning of the terms under discussion here, including anima-
tion, the documentary, and realism, in modernist cinema evolve over time and in different con-
texts.2 In ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’ (1946), he describes E Reynaud as ‘the wonderful, the
sublime E. Reynaud,’ while simultaneously asserting that ‘any account of the cinema that was
drawn merely from the technical inventions that made it possible would be a poor one indeed’
(Bazin, 2005[1967]: 18). Bazin also distinguishes ‘illusion’ and the ‘cheating’ exemplified by the
visual trickery of the trompe-l’oeil in painting from ‘an ontogenetic realism’ (p. 19), and it is this
kind of distinction that provides the foundation for Andrew’s invocation of an antipodean paradigm
to describe the contemporary cinematic landscape.
Among the problems that have arisen from the recent overemphasis on ‘the indexical’ may be
that Bazin and the conversations about realism that grow out of his work have become too exclu-
sively aligned with an oversimplified sense of the indexical, photo-based image. As Thomas
Elsaesser (2011: 9) argues:

Bazin’s realism was taken as naively pertaining to truth-claims, announcing a correspondence between
what was on the screen and what was in the world, clearly a fallacious or ‘ideological’ position.
However, Bazin… had always maintained a more nuanced, aesthetic view, arguing that realism is a
function of artifice, and that realism comes by way of belief.

Bazin’s distinction between the ‘ontogenetic realism’ of cinema and the trickery of certain kinds of
painting implies a separation of cinematic realism from all forms of non-automatic or non-indexical
images, and there are many other moments in Bazin’s writing where the automaticity of the
mechanically-reproduced image trumps other media, not necessarily in terms of the epistemologi-
cal content of the image, but rather in terms of the image’s ability to provoke a certain response in
the viewer, the ability of the image to open direct experiences of the world across time, laying bare
distant realities to the viewer’s ‘love’ (Bazin, 2005[1967]: 15). Nowhere is this position more con-
cretely stated than in ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1945), the essay that has been
most responsible for an excessive alignment of Bazin with photographic indexicality:

Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its
reproduction. A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the
Beckman 261

promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear
away our faith. (p. 14)

Although this statement cautions against repressing the question of ‘faith’ as we think about the
animated documentary, ‘faith’ is only one aspect, albeit a central and compelling one, of Bazin’s
thinking about how realist images help construct and enable our relation to the world. While draw-
ing is here placed in an inferior position to photography, elsewhere it holds an important place in
Bazin’s thinking about the ontology of cinema. In ‘An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism’, for exam-
ple, Bazin repeatedly draws on comparisons with the speed, precision, mobility and selectivity of
sketching as he attempts to explain what cinematic ‘tact’ might involve:

Certain genres call for speed, for work done in the heat of the moment, but surgery could not call for a
greater sureness of touch, for greater precision. It is only at this price that the Italian film has that air of
documentary, a naturalness nearer to the spoken than to the written account, to the sketch rather than
the painting. It calls for the ease and sure eye of Rossellini, Lattuada, Vergano, and de Santis. In their
hands the camera is endowed with well-defined cinematographic tact. (Bazin, 1972[1948]: 32)

Later in the same essay, he continues:

I have had to dwell at some length on this minor example to avoid making a purely abstract affirmation
concerning what I regard, in an almost psychological sense of the word, as cinematic ‘tact’. A shot of
this kind by virtue of its dynamism belongs with the movement of a hand drawing a sketch, leaving a
space here, filling in there, here sketching round the subject, and there bringing it into relief. I am
thinking of the slow motion in the documentary on Matisse which allows us to observe, beneath the
continuous and uniform arabesques of the stroke, the varying hesitations of the artist’s hand. In such a
case the camera movement is important. The camera must be as equally ready to move as to remain
still. (pp. 32–33)

If, for Bazin, drawing fails to match photography in the realm of faith, it later becomes a model for
the role camera movement might play in the development of a cinematic realism. Though ‘facts are
facts’ (p. 35), our sense of the world is created cinematically by a mind that leaps in response to
more than faith alone.

II Drawing the real

Even as film theorists ponder the status of rendered images within the context of digital cinema, it
becomes increasingly difficult to identify the indexical elements of animated images when they are
guided by a photorealist aesthetic, and often use techniques that deconstruct distinctions between
capture and rendering, such as rotoscoping. As the terms, distinctions, and value systems under-
girding our grasp of modern images shifts, a number of possible pathways open up. For some, it
becomes necessary to insist upon the persistent unique status of the photograph’s relationship to
truth and belief, and to interrogate what this persistence reveals about photography. David
Rodowick (2007: 62), for example, writes, echoing Bazin:

Despite all self-consciousness about the possibility of altering or falsifying photographs, they will still
be taken, and questioned, as historical documents in a way that historical painting or sketches, or,
262 Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6(3)

better, the sketchings of court artists will not be, even if the artist was present as witness to the events
depicted.

For others, the loosening of the index’s grip on the photorealist image creates a space for taking
reportage drawing seriously in its own right, not as an auratic and mythical form of art making
with, as Clemens Krümmel (2004: 8–9) puts it, ‘a genesis myth of time immemorial’, nor as a
runner-up to either photography or to other media in relation to which it has historically been ‘clas-
sified as a secondary discipline, a preparatory technique or mode of commentary in relation to the
‘real artwork’. Taking this approach to drawing has the potential to open up new avenues for think-
ing about how drawing might enter film theory, whether through drawn animated films, or through
the way that drawing inspires cinematic techniques, as when Bazin describes cinematic movement
in terms of the sketch. The exhibition for which Krümmel writes, ‘Diving Trips: Drawing as
Reportage’, makes an intelligent intervention into how we understand the historical role of drawn
images over the last 150 years, considering why fact-based drawing often emerges in ‘difficult’
spaces at particular moments. Krümmel explains:

These spaces include not only sites that for juridical, political, ideological, economic, or technical
reasons cannot be captured with other visual media, but also imaginary spaces that refer to utopian
projects, inventions of the future, films in planning, and dreams, fantasies, and inner images more
generally. (p. 10)

The animated documentary tends to produce a similar narrative to the one we find here about
­drawing: rendered images of various kinds provide an alternative to photo-based images when, as
in the case of the courtroom sketch, the subject being documented lies outside the reach of the
camera’s vision. Numerous aspects of the subject contribute to its condition of being visually out
of reach, including: its scale (too large or too small for the camera, a factor in animation’s place in
the scientific documentary); its subjectivity (an experience lived on the emotional, psychological,
or physical plane that may have no obvious visible manifestation, such as love, depression, or
pain); its risk factor (a testimony that would put the represented subject in danger, as in Sheila
Sofian’s animated 1997 documentary about battered women, Survivors, which uses animated
images of women instead of blurred headshots to protect the identity of the speakers); or its surreal-
ity, its ability to represent life ‘beneath’ the surface of the visible world.3
Yet this supplemental paradigm, in which drawn reportage and the animated documentary fill in
the gaps left in the camera’s wake, does not account for those animated documentaries made about
events that have already been caught on camera and widely shown in their live-action versions (in
contrast to filmed testimonies that were filmed but not shown in their live-action version in order
to protect the speaker). How, then, do we account for this kind of repetition? Does it mark the
photo-based image’s failure to ‘bear away our faith’, or perhaps a response to a (not unprecen-
dented) instance of photo-based faith moving us in the wrong direction? With these questions in
mind, I will now turn my attention to a close analysis of two very different animated documentary
accounts of courtroom trials. The first, The Simpson Verdict (2002), is a 3-minute animated loop by
German–Japanese artist Kota Ezawa documenting the announcement of the OJ Simpson trial ver-
dict on 2 October 1995. The second, Chicago 10 (dir. Brett Morgen, 2007) is a feature-length docu-
mentary about the unfilmed trial of the group of political activists known as the ‘Chicago Seven’,
made up of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Tom
Hayden and Lee Weiner, a group that originally included Black Panther leader Bobby Seale before
Seale’s exclusion from the trial.
Beckman 263

Ezawa’s work redraws, frame-by-frame, live television footage using computer drawing soft-
ware, and is exhibited on a television monitor within the art museum context. By contrast, Chicago
10 juxtaposes archival film, television and sound recordings from various sources, animated
sequences based upon court transcripts, and sequences that combine live-action and animated
material within the same frame. The courtroom provides a particularly interesting context for con-
sidering the status of the animated documentary image given that it is one of the few spaces in
which, historically, the rendered image has enjoyed ongoing standing since the invention of pho-
tography, largely because the faith-inspiring capacities of the photograph have been viewed with
suspicion.4 These two examples also allow us to consider: the role of exhibition context in shaping
how we evaluate animated documentary images; the place that television occupies in a conversa-
tion that is often dominated by a line drawn between only two terms, ‘film’ and ‘digital animation’,
bypassing the medium of television altogether; and the difference between the animation of a trial
that was filmed and broadcast, like Simpson’s, and one, like the Chicago Seven’s (or Eight’s) that
was suppressed from the audio-visual record.5

III Kota Ezawa’s The Simpson Verdict (2002)

Judge Ito:   Good morning, again, ladies and gentlemen.

The Jury:   Good morning.
Judge Ito:  All right. Mrs Robertson, would you – do you have the envelope with the sealed
verdict forms, please?
The Clerk:   Yes, your Honor.
Judge Ito:  Would you give those to Deputy Trower? And would you return those to our
Foreperson, juror no. 1? Alright, Madam Foreperson, would you please open
the envelope and check the condition of the verdict forms? Alright, Madam
Foreperson, juror no 1, you’ve had the opportunity to review the verdict
forms?
The Foreperson:   Yes.
Judge Ito:   Are they the same forms that you signed and are they in order?
The Foreperson:  Yes, they are.
Judge Ito:  Would you hand those, please, to Deputy Trower? And you have signed and
dated those verdict forms, indicating the jury’s verdicts?
The Foreperson:   Yes, I have.
Judge Ito:  All right. Thank you. All right. Mrs Robertson. All right, Mr Cochr... Mr
Simpson, would you please stand and face the jury? Mrs Robertson.
The Clerk:  Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles. In the matter of People of
the State of California versus Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA097211.
We, the jury, in the above-entitled action, find the Defendant, Orenthal James
Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder in violation of penal code section
187(A), a felony, upon Nicole Brown Simpson, a human being, as charged in
Count I of the information.
   Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles, in the mat-
ter of People of the State of California versus Orenthal James Simpson. We, the
jury, in the above-entitled action, find the Defendant, Orenthal James Simpson,
not guilty of the crime of murder in violation of penal code section 187(A), a
264 Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6(3)

felony, upon Ronald Lyle Goldman, a human being, as charged in Count II of

the information. We, the jury, in the above-entitled action, further find the spe-
cial circumstances that the Defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, has in this case
been convicted of at least one crime of murder of the first degree and one or
more crimes of murder of the first or second degree to be not true. Signed this
2nd day of October, 1995. Juror 230. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is this
your verdict, so say you one, so say you all?
The Jury:  Yes.

Contrary to what the reader may think, what we have here is not a complete transcript of the verdict
of the OJ Simpson criminal trial, but rather a transcript of the soundtrack to Kota Ezawa’s animated
video installation, The Simpson Verdict, a 3-minute loop in which excerpts from the original audio-
recording of the verdict’s pronouncement are synchronized with cartoon-like images of the pro-
ceedings that Ezawa redraws and animates from the television footage that was broadcast live
around the world in 1996. The two soundtracks are basically indistinguishable except for the fact
that Ezawa edits out one section of the text. Yet while in the live television broadcast, sound and
image collaborate with the aim of giving the spectator a front row seat at this trial’s moment of
revelation, The Simpson Verdict establishes a complex contrapuntal relationship between the
authentic recorded soundtrack and the bold blocks of color that recall cut-out paper, leaving view-
ers wondering not only what, if anything, is revealed by the animated version of this scenario, but
also whether the television footage revealed anything more than its drawn counterpart in terms of
the ‘truth’ of the Simpson case. This contrapuntal relationship is emphasized by the fact that, while
the voices we hear are those of Judge Ito, the clerk, the foreperson, and the jury, the face that most
captures our visual attention and dominates the loop is Simpson’s, and he is silent. The absence of
any speech by Simpson in The Simpson Verdict not only positions him as a voiceless character
before the law, one whose ‘meaning’ is determined solely by how we interpret his visual appear-
ance, but also positions him as a character whose rendered image does not stand in tension with an
indexical recording of his own voice, unlike, for example, judge Ito. This is not to claim that
Ezawa’s rendering turns Simpson into a victim of either the law or the media; rather, in transform-
ing camera images into colored drawings, Ezawa seems to strip the recording of some of its affec-
tive grip on the viewer in order to enable reflection on how the trial images functioned. Athough in
The Simpson Verdict we may still watch the minute movements of Simpson’s animated face, we do
so less because we believe that we will be able to read his guilt or innocence in these movements
than because these movements focus attention on how the spectacular mediation of this trial staged
a realist drama about race in late 20th-century America, often drawing on established techniques
based on the history and grammar of cinematic courtroom dramas, including the close-up of the
accused at the moment of judgment, the courtroom pan and the camera’s slow movement across
the faces of the jury.
Our attention is drawn to Simpson’s face through a couple of emphasis techniques, both of
which are found in the original television footage but which become more visible to us through
Ezawa’s selective redrawing of the footage. First, our conscious knowledge of the absence of the
photo-indexical image and the camera’s role in the production of it results in a far greater aware-
ness of the visual effects of the television camera’s framing and movement as they are recreated
through frame-by-frame drawings. Ezawa only represents the features of those faces that are in
focus in the original footage, and this filtering process allows us to register exactly how few faces
are actually in focus in television news footage, and how the camera’s movements and stases direct
our vision and make certain interpretive demands upon the view. The camera pans swiftly across
Beckman 265

Figures 1 and 2.  Stills from The Simpson Verdict (2002). Courtesy of Kota Ezawa and the Haines Gallery.
266 Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6(3)

Figure 3.  Stills from The Simpson Verdict (2002). Courtesy of Kota Ezawa and the Haines Gallery.

the people sitting in court, rendering most of them part of a collective and somewhat blurry mass
made up of differing skin tones. By contrast, a more static camera settles on Simpson’s face, often
keeping it in center frame, and recording its every movement. Simpson leans in and turns his head
as if to hear better; the camera directs our attention to tiny movements of his eyes, eyebrows and
nose; he evidences no expression change as the first verdict is announced, and only a small, almost
mechanical flash of a smile when the second verdict is announced.
In their live action version, are these movements television’s equivalents of cinematic ‘facts’
and, if so, what meaning, if any, is the viewer supposed to derive from them and their animated
counterparts? How does the original, indexical television footage of this sequence differ from
Ezawa’s faithful and laborious reconstruction of it, and does the former tell us something more
about the event than the animated reconstruction is able to do, or vice versa? Does the animated
version of the footage, for example, stripped of its referentiality, allow us to look without expecting
to know in a way that enables us to look at the live-action footage differently?
The Simpson Verdict differs from many recent animated documentaries in offering a drawn
animation version of one of the late 20th-century’s largest media events. By creating an animated
double of live-action footage that is already very well known, Ezawa’s work operates through a
kind of uncanny excess, and its doppelganger quality makes it particularly useful for comparing the
difference between live action and animated documentary and the respective relation of these
forms to the concept of truth, foregrounded in this work because of the courtroom setting. This
process of ‘constructing’ documentary scenarios when live footage of the event already exists is
Beckman 267

not without precedent; indeed, as Janet Staiger (1996: 43) points out, it has a rather long history,
dating back to at least the 1950s. Yet while television re-enactments are produced for events that
have been recorded only when ‘it is determined that the re-enactment will produce a better visual
impact or is stronger dramatically than the documentary footage’ (p. 43), in this case, the sequence
of images, the framing, and the soundtrack all remain the same, and are based on footage already
shot and edited for ‘optimum’ impact.
The footage Ezawa appropriates (using lo-res material purchased directly from one of the news
channels covering the event, as the footage was not yet available online) was watched live on 3
October 1995 by over 150 million viewers, a striking contrast to Simpson’s civil trial, which
banned cameras from the courtroom, resulting in nightly televised dramatic reenactments of the
day’s events on E! Entertainment Network (Kahana, 2009: 48). As SL Alexander (1996: 169)
points out: ‘more than 50 miles of cable were needed to service the television cameras that pro-
vided an unprecedented combined 2,000 hours of live gavel-to-gavel cable TV coverage by Court
TV, CNN, and E! Entertainment Network.’ Furthermore, this legal event featured a presiding judge
who, in contrast to some other judges, resolutely supported the belief that cameras bring us closer
to truth. After the trial, Judge Lance Ito concluded: ‘If you take the cameras out of the courtroom,
then you hide, I think, a certain measure of truth from the public’ (p. 172). Unlike Chicago 10,
which uses animation as a logical extension of the practice of courtroom drawing to restore a visual
dimension to the court transcripts of the unfilmed trial of the Chicago Seven (or Eight) and draws
heavily on the standard toolbox of the documentary filmmaker, The Simpson Verdict brings anima-
tion to bear on a trial that was defined primarily by being overexposed to the public. Because of
this overfamiliarity, it makes us ponder, in a way that Chicago 10 does not, what it was that we
were repeatedly shown during the Simpson trial as well as how we were shown it, and the experi-
ence of Ezawa’s work involves both looking and the memory of looking.
Ezawa’s selective attribution of facial features highlights the impossible demands we make on
faces filmed in close-up, for truth, falsity and, above all, legibility. What, after all, were viewers
hoping to see when they gazed on Simpson’s mute face as he received the verdict? Although
Ezawa’s redrawing of these faces gives the viewer a feeling that the revelation offered by the origi-
nal footage is being withheld, the frustrating experience of this animated version may be closer to
the experience of the live-action original than we may suspect. As Stanley Cavell (1979: 181) notes
of one of cinema’s most extensive live-action explorations of the human face, Carl Theodor
Dreyer’s Passion of St. Joan, also a narrative of trial and punishment, ‘Dreyer’s film above all
declares the power of the camera to interrogate its subjects and, for all its capacity for pitilessness,
its final impotence to penetrate the mystery of the human face.’
If Ezawa’s animation doubles the body of Simpson represented in the live footage, it also severs
the image from its live referent, emphasizing its status as image, and concentrating our attention on
its visual composition. In a recent interview, inspired by Cavell’s (1979: 171) suggestion that the
world of cartoons is, unlike the world of ‘movies’, ‘a world devoid of sex or death’, I asked Ezawa
whether the fact that his animated bodies are rooted in indexical images of historical subjects
makes them seem more vulnerable than other animated bodies, or whether the process of animation
destroys their referentiality. He replied:

It’s really both … On the one hand, it takes the corporeal experience away because [the bodies] are
abstract and more cartoon-like, but on the other hand, the visual information of the image gets distilled
and stylized, and one reason why artists have used stylization for centuries is to get the attention of the
viewer… By stylizing something, by distilling information, the information can also become more
vibrant and more visceral in a way. So both. (Beckman, 2011a)
268 Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6(3)

Stylization here primarily draws our attention to the question of how symbolically-marked bodies
– bodies that evoke the history of racialized looking in America as well as the look of the law – are
technologically mediated, and what indexical and non-indexical visual media bring to that history.
Does Ezawa’s animated adaptation of the verdict provoke feelings of loss in the viewer? I don’t
think that one would have to ascribe to totalizing theories of spectatorial identification to acknowl-
edge that some of the affective intensity of the trial experience seems to evaporate with the docu-
mentary footage and excluded frames; but it would be incorrect to frame the relationship of Ezawa’s
drawn images to the original footage solely in terms of loss and subtraction, for Ezawa’s process
also has additive dimensions. Just as the addition of saturated blocks of color serves a number of
purposes, including focusing our visual attention, reminding us of the ultimate two-dimensionality
of the photorealist image, and mapping the skin tones in the courtroom, Ezawa’s temporal inter-
ventions transform the relationship between time and the bodies in the selected sequence.6 While
the recorded voices track the time of televisual liveness, the redrawn images instill this modern
event with a different kind of time, the slower pace of frame by frame drawing. Though ‘artist’s
animation’ has at times worked to distinguish itself from the mechanical and automatic qualities of
­modernist media through an assertion of the handmade, in Ezawa’s work, the hand is kept at bay
through the phenomenon of computer drawing software, even as the slower temporality of one-
image-at-a-time persists.
Hayden White (1996: 23) discusses both the Rodney King video and the ‘endless representa-
tions on TV’ of the 1986 NASA Challenger space shuttle explosion after lift-off within the context
of the ‘revolution in representational practices known as cultural “modernism” and the technolo-
gies of representation made possible by the electronics revolution’, technologies that, presumably,
would include cinema, television, and computer animation under the same umbrella. Yet Ezawa’s
work, by translating one modern medium into another, resists the homogenization of ‘modern
media’, and considers how individual modern technologies of representation have impacted our
sense of history’s relation to the image in different ways.
Animation and documentary are interesting in this regard because they both move between the
media of cinema and television. Separately, they have both made us think more carefully about
how we understand the limits and ambitions of cinematic realism; together, especially at this
moment of rapid media transition, they press us to consider cinema’s past and future in less linear
and more web-like ways. Ezawa’s work encourages us to think a path through the animated docu-
mentary into cinema not because The Simpson Verdict is or claims to be cinematic in any way; in
many ways, it doesn’t. Its redrawn footage is shown as a loop on a monitor in the art museum.
Rather, this work belongs in our contemporary conversations about how rendered images of reality
change or refine our understanding of cinematic realism and the ethical demands this mode of real-
ism makes upon us at least in part because Ezawa uses this same digital re-drawing method to
reflect upon a wide variety of modern images, including fiction film.7
Ezawa is only one of a number of artists currently using animation to reconstruct (or document?
or reenact?) iconic moments from the film historical canon in ways that may be regarded as hom-
ages but could also be thought of as what Suzanne Buchan (2006), describing her own methodol-
ogy for thinking about animation, calls ‘microanalysis’. Who’s Afraid of Black, White and Grey?
(2003), Ezawa’s two-channel installation, for example, projects animated redrawings of sequences
from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (dir. Mike Nichols, 1966); but the work’s title simultaneously
gestures toward Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue II, an abstract painting
from 1967, the year after the release of Nichols’s film, implying that the movement between live-
action cinema and animation simultaneously requires a movement between the histories of film
and art. Similarly, Ezawa’s Last Year At Marienbad 3D (4 minutes, 2008) redraws parts of Alain
Beckman 269

Resnais’ 1961 film. In this work, the artist selects scenes from the film in which characters appear
motionless, and this stillness becomes the paradoxical starting point for his three-dimensional,
silent animated film, as if challenging the view of cinema as a response to an ever-accelerating
world. Most recently, Ezawa’s installation Odessa Staircase Redux (2009) featured, among other
works, pen and ink re-drawings of the frames surrounding each cut of the Odessa Staircase
sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925), itself an experimental reenact-
ment of an historical event (and one of the questions this work raises is how animated drawings of
an event differ at the affective, epistemological and formal levels from live-action reenactments).
Extending still further the initial translation process from film to drawing, Ezawa also published
these and other images from the installation in book form. Combining cinema’s pre-history with its
avant-garde tradition of discontinuity editing, this series of images functions as a kind of anti-­
animation, a failed flip-book that promises but ultimately withholds the satisfaction of continuous
motion and the enlivening of still forms, offering the book’s reader–viewer a frustrating series of
cuts instead of the thrill that illusions of motion tend to bring.
At times, the contemporary art world’s engagement with film history is viewed as destructive to
the integrity of the cinematic experience. Andrew (2010: 86), for example, writes that ‘the museum
has officially kidnapped the structure of the film experience so as to contain it for the delectation
of its own public.’ He continues:

In the postmodern period, artists have dismantled the film frame, letting the cinematic lifeblood
hemorrhage into a range of multimedia states named by Raymond Bellour ‘Entr’Images.’ He, along
with Jacques Aumont, Philippe Dubois, and Luc Vancherie, have tracked the itinerary of two generations
of visual artists who have carted their images out of the cinema. (p. 86)

While Andrew’s own investment clearly lies with a particular kind of cinematic modernism, he
does check the nostalgia that haunts his writing, recognizing that:

Cinema must press forward into the new century, by taking into itself the subject matter that surrounds
it, increasingly a new media culture. The impure films that result will no doubt comprise a different
cinema from the one we have known, but it will be a cinema worthy of its past, to the extent that it
maintains what might best be termed the cinematic ethos. An attitude, rather than a doctrine, is what
André Bazin passed down, an attitude of curiosity, spontaneity, and responsiveness to a reality
conceived of as indefinitely enigmatic and worthy of our care. (p. 94)

Part of our task, then, might involve considering whether, why and how the animated documentary
responds to and elicits cares for the enigmatic world it represents, and what challenges it encounters
as it tries to do so.

IV Chicago 10 (dir. Brett Morgen, 2007)

Brett Morgen made Chicago 10 not only because he wanted young people opposed to America’s
contemporary wars to understand the ‘commitment’ of protestors in the 1960s, but also because,
having studied the 16mm documentary footage, a 1970s BBC documentary and the 1980s HBO
re-enactment of the trial, Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8, he felt that ‘the one thing lacking
was something cinematic that shows how chaotic and frightening the situation must have been’
(Hayden, 2008: 116, emphasis added). Wanting to ‘add something to the canon’, he needed to ‘use
the tools that are available to us today’ (p. 116). It is easy to see what Morgen means by a
270 Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6(3)

‘cinematic’ treatment of the material when the film is compared with Ezawa’s Simpson Verdict
installation, and yet it is precisely this ‘cinematic’ identity of contemporary animated realism that
poses a problem for Andrew in his contemplation of the present and future life of a Bazinian cin-
ematic ethos. Andrew’s resistance to certain modes of animation as cinema has less to do with an
unwavering commitment to the indexical photographic image – after all, he highlights Bazin’s
comparison of the Bell and Howell newsreel camera with the elliptical and high-speed form of the
sketch – and much more to do with a concern that animated realities run the risk of eradicating the
tension film reveals between ‘the human (imagination, intention) and the recalcitrant chunks of
recorded reality’ (p. 30). The best filmmakers working with animation, for Andrew, are those who,
like Jia Zhang-ke, operate within a modernist paradigm and deploy animation ‘always in the ser-
vice of cinema’ (p. 59). Does Chicago 10 fit within this sense of ‘the cinematic’ and, if not, how
might we begin to describe and evaluate its attempt to animate the real?
In a careful analysis of Chicago 10 within a dissertation that provides one of the best surveys of
the history of this mode of documentary filmmaking to date, Annabelle Honess Roe (2009: 134)
suggests that while the film, with its stylized graphics, never attempts a ‘fake indexicality’, it mobi-
lizes a number of audio-visual techniques to create a sense of verisimilitude. These include: (1) the
use of motion capture technology; (2) occasional use of photorealist animation that contrasts with
the overall cartoon-style graphics, as in the depiction of water droplets at one moment in the film;
(3) the use of intertitles to highlight the court scenes’ reliance on archived transcripts; (4) oral
similitude through the use of voice imitator Hank Azaria, the rerecording by defense attorney
Leonard Weinglass of his own words, and the use of original radio show recordings; (5) repeated
visual matches, for example using clothing, as the film cuts between animated and documentary
footage; (6) the doubling of the content of some of the animated sequences in documentary footage
to corroborate the accuracy of the rendered scenes; and finally, (7) the compositing of live action
and animated sequences, making it hard, at times, Roness Hoe suggests, ‘to discern the animation
from the blurry live action footage in which it is placed’ (p. 136). Although Roness Hoe briefly
considers the possibility that the cartoon style could function as a symbolic analogy for a trial that
Jerry Rubin described as ‘a cartoon show’ (p. 138), she ultimately rejects this interpretation in
favor of an argument that stresses the way Morgen gives animation ‘the same epistemological
status as the “genuine” documentary material’ (p. 137).
I want to take this last comment as the starting point for an alternative way of thinking about
Chicago 10. Although Honess Roe acknowledges that one of the film’s themes is that ‘the trial was
a joke’ (p. 138), she does not really elaborate upon the consequences of Rubin describing the trial as
a ‘cartoon show’. Yet a parallel reading might usefully consider the status of ‘the cartoon’ within the
world being depicted in Chicago 10 in order to understand the historical questions that emerge from
the interaction between documentary and animated footage within this film. The two forms exist in
a chiasmic relation to each other, criss-crossing the real and presenting what Bazin described as
‘fragments of imaged reality’ (1972[1948]: 30–31) without ever fully claiming to capture it com-
pletely. Like the use of the split screen, the juxtaposition of animated and live-action documentary
footage allows Morgen to explore the existence of competing realities even as other aspects of the
film encourage the viewer to resolve the two modes into a singular and coherent sense of the past.
While some of the film clearly works to equate animation and live-action recording, I want to
explore why the depicted events simultaneously seem to resist this alignment.
In his interview with Brett Morgen, Tom Hayden (2008: 118), a member of the Chicago 7 and
a leader of MOBE (the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), points out
that Morgen’s focus on Abbie Hoffman over other prominent protestors allows the ‘theatrical fac-
tor’ to supersede the ‘drier historical one’, noting that one of Hoffman’s autobiographies is entitled,
Beckman 271

Soon to Be A Major Motion Picture. The film does not contradict Hayden’s characterization of
Hoffman as theatrical – think of his animated stand-up comedy routines, or his appearance in a top
hat inscribed with the word ‘YIPPIE’ in yellow letters along with a striped t-shirt that aligns him
with Dr Seuss’s Cat in the Hat and other comic mischief-makers. It does, however, suggest that the
importance of the cartoon extends beyond either Hoffman’s crafted persona or the value of the trial,
having rather some broader implications for how we might understand the interaction of different
kinds of movement, including political movement, in the context of the evolution, articulation, and
representation of political action at this particular historical moment.
The actions of MOBE and other affiliated antiwar protestors in the late 1960s repeatedly invoke
a cartoon and anti-realist logic.8 Morgen foregrounds, rather than represses such moments, making
the film’s juxtaposition of live action and animation more interesting – and perhaps more cinematic
– than it might otherwise be. The film’s archival and animated footage documents the centrality of
theatricality and caricature to a generation of forward-looking protestors who invoked the ‘cartoon-
ish’ in order to reject existing structures of reality and to reach toward an unknown future alternative.
As our own present tries to understand this ‘reach’ through animated images of the past, animation
extends into the political and historical realm, asking us to consider not only the relation between
past and contemporary uses of cartoon-inspired political strategies, but also whether the representa-
tion of ‘cartoon-style’ protests in animated rather than live-action form inhibits or increases the effec-
tiveness of the selected strategy by aesthetically doubling it. At one point, Rubin and Hoffman enter
court wearing judges’ robes; when told to remove them, they do so, only to reveal that they are wear-
ing policemen’s uniforms below their robes, as if the law is simply an onion-like layered charade.
Clown faces and masks worn at demonstrations offer the human face not as a site of elusive truth, but
as a potential place for conscious political inscription. The speaking animal, which for Stanley Cavell
(1979) is one of the figures marking the boundary between ‘movies’ and cartoons, haunts the archi-
val footage of political protest as crowds chant ‘oink, oink, oink’ at the so-called ‘pigs’. Although
cameras capture a wide variety of caricatured images on posters in marches, one poster stands out as
explicitly asking us to consider what kind of politics is forged at the juncture of the cartoon and the
indexical image: a photograph of President Johnson shown disappearing down a drawn toilet bowl is
accompanied by the slogan, ‘Th- Th- Th- Th- That’s All Folks!’
While Honess Roe (2009) focuses on Morgen’s successful use of ‘oral similitude’, my own
experience of Chicago 10 left me less with a sense of the successful stitching together of the ani-
mated image with the human voice than of a landscape in which animated bodies were haunted by
the specter of (often non-matching) ‘real’ bodies, especially when recognizable ‘star’ voices like
those of Nick Nolte and Mark Ruffalo were ‘affixed’ to historical figures such as Thomas Foran
and Jerry Rubin. Similarly, when archival recordings of voices were juxtaposed with the voices of
imitators, the film’s characters started to proliferate in uncanny ways because of these (barely)
perceivable differences. Although this ‘cluttering’ effect was often productive and thought-provok-
ing, it seemed to resist rather than court an aesthetic of seamlessness.
Similar disruptions to a coherent realist aesthetic happen at the visual level and, as with the
sound examples I mention, they often occur in the context of gestures that, at least at first glance,
seem designed to operate precisely in the service of a photo-realist aesthetic. First, we might note
Morgen’s use of color to signal temporal shifts between the past and present, something that he
borrows from a moment in documentary history when it was more important than it is now to
establish what Janet Staiger (1996: 43) calls ‘the ontological status of the material’. Staiger writes:
‘Another way to differentiate the ontological status of the material has been to shoot in black and
white for the dramatized past and in color for the current interviews.’ As Morgen switches between
vivid saturated color and black and white animation, he complicates any simple distinctions
272 Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6(3)

between ‘live action’ and ‘animated’ documentary by reminding us that documentary history is full
of changing codes of realism, as well as of live action re-enactments and imaginative dramatiza-
tions whose epistemological status is anything but secure. Similarly, in one flashback sequence
depicting animated Yippies brainstorming about what form their actions might take, a live-action
Western plays on an animated TV set. Although this juxtaposition might seem to foreground the
difference between the political actions of young Americans against the myths of their forefathers
perpetuated through spectacle culture, this reading is held in check by a later scene in which we
learn from a live-action TV news reporter that 10–12-year-old Chicago boys have begun to replace
their games of ‘Cowboys and Indians’ with a new game: ‘Cops and Demonstrators’, perhaps sug-
gesting that American political paradigms have not shifted as much as might have been hoped.
Self-reflexive shots questioning the epistemological status of the ‘genuine’ documentary material
abound. The knowledge-value of the live-action footage of the Democratic convention is held in
check by the giant CBS NEWS sign that hangs within the conventional hall, reminding us that we
are watching a for-camera production; and when, prior to a news conference with the Yippies, the
camera operators are asked, ‘Is anyone not rolling?’, one Yippie simply mutters: ‘La Dolce Vita’.
The film’s exploration of the relationship between politics, history, and different kinds of mov-
ing images is finally explored in more abstract ways through the representation of movement itself,
and specifically through a rather self-conscious highlighting of both the depicted body in motion,
and the animated illusion of the camera’s movements, as if to ask what political or philosophical
worth either the movement of the world or the movement of the camera can have if they are merely
rendered rather than seen through the lens of each other as they are, for example, in Gilles Deleuze’s
movement–image. Although, as Honess Roe (2009: 132) points out, human motion is rendered
throughout the animation sequences with the help of motion capture technologies, the resulting
lack of realism is less technically flawed (something that Honess Roe’s description of the move-
ments as ‘blocky and jerky’ suggests) than downright uncanny. While OJ Simpson’s face barely
twitches as he awaits his verdict in Ezawa’s redrawing of the trial’s live action footage, in Chicago
10, the animated Yippies literally embody the mobilization for which they are fighting as they seem
constantly to sway slightly, even when seated, not unlike the alien motion featured in Tim Burton’s
Mars Attacks (1996). Their uncanny mobility is fully realized at the moment when Allen Ginsberg
floats slightly above the ground as the trial proceeds.
Just as Morgen resists naturalizing human motion in the animated sequences, so he seems also
to exaggerate the effects that connote the ‘movement’ of the fictional camera, as if to remind us that
the presence of the camera is only imagined, as perhaps might also be our faith in the objectivity
of even the ‘real’ camera. When real cameras are allowed in real courtrooms, the mandate for non-
intrusive filming often results in particularly static shots, something fictional courtroom scenes
often mimic, perhaps for the sake of realism. By contrast, Morgen’s use of animation permits him
to explore how the camera might film a courtroom if given free range. Swift pans from prosecutor
to defender to suggest, as if in a rapid sketch, the dramatic pathways of affective intensities moving
around the room. Low-angle shots emphasize Judge Hoffman’s authority. Helicopter shots zoom
down on people on the stand from the far corners of the ceiling, an illusion of a swooping down-
ward camera motion that evokes an earlier moment in the film when Morgen superimposes archi-
val footage of falling parachutes and bombs over animated courtroom sequences. In such moments,
animation does not ‘piggyback’ on documentary footage in order to be corroborated by it, as
Honess Roe correctly suggests it does in some of the film’s other scenes. Rather, Morgen invokes
a collage aesthetic familiar to us from artists like Martha Rosler, and particularly her ‘Bringing the
War Home’ series from 1967–1972, one that uses the difference between styles to highlight
Beckman 273

collective refusals to examine how disparate spaces, spaces that could not be represented through
the gaze of a single lens, must be seen together, not in denial of history, but because of it.
In 1999, Jane Gaines suggested that the task of contemporary political documentary had to do
with ‘finding a way to be both a champion of the critique of realism and a defender of the uses of
realism’ (p. 93). Perhaps this is still the case. If contemporary technological developments, includ-
ing the recent expanded interest in animated realities, are not (or not only) an abandonment of an
existing, modernist cinematic ethos, but rather (or also) an attempt to give form to lived experi-
ences and political realities that live-action realist forms have failed to grasp, then they provide an
important space for the development of thoughts and political practices that currently only exist in
sketch-like form.

Notes
1. As Tom Conley (2007: 97) has shown in his reading of Casablanca, documentary footage, animation
and the realist fiction film cross paths in the visualization of the ‘non-place’, the place of transit, through
the superimposition of animated maps over stock footage of unspecified locations within the context of a
fictional narrative.
2. For my discussion of Bazin on Disney, see Beckman (2011b). For a discussion of Bazin’s critique of
Disney’s ‘rubbery realism’, see Wiedenfeld in Andrew (2011).
3. Paul Ward (2005: 86–87) introduces some of these categories, and others, into his discussion of the
animated documentary, noting that the ‘fantastic mode of animated documentaries … explores what lies
beneath the surface of “everyday” reality, often with a surrealist approach.’ Ward also draws attention
to Paul Wells’s rather phallic term, ‘penetrative animation’, in which ‘abstract concepts and previously
unimaginable states can be visualized through animation in ways that are difficult to achieve or which
remain unpersuasive in the live-action context’ (quoted in Ward, 2005: 93).
4. Courtroom photography was used as early as 1915 in a libel lawsuit against former president Theodore
Roosevelt, but it came under close scrutiny in 1932 following the trial and conviction of Bruno Haupt-
mann in 1935 for the first-degree murder of the 1-year-old son of Colonel Charles Lindbergh. Although
photographs were taken early in the trial, the judge banned the film recording of events except when
he was off the bench. The camera operator, however, secretly used remote control and soundproofing
technologies to film several testimonies. Hauptmann appealed against his conviction, which cited the
unfair influence of the camera’s presence on his verdict. Even though the appeal failed, the American Bar
Association passed ‘Canon 35’ in 1937, banning cameras from the courtroom on several grounds, includ-
ing photography’s distortion of the courtroom’s solemnity, its undue pressure on judges, its disruption of
proceedings, its preclusion of obtaining material witnesses, and its transformation of the courtroom into
a space of entertainment. This decision was upheld and amended to include television cameras in 1952
and again, with some minor amendments, in 1963, when many states adopted the ban. For a full history
of the legislation surrounding cameras in court, see Alexander (1996) and Baker (1978–1979).
5. I am grateful to Lisa Parks for encouraging me to think about the place of television in this discussion of
cinema’s relationship with animation.
6. ‘Skin’, of course, is a highly over-determined word in this particular context, as Ezawa chooses to ani-
mate one of the 20th century’s most racially-charged media moments. This is also not the only occa-
sion when Ezawa has chosen to engage through repetition highly charged American media texts. In
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (2005), for example, he animates Abraham Zapruder’s documentary
footage of John F Kennedy’s assassination alongside an animated version of the reenactment of the assas-
sination of Abraham Lincoln found in DW Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of A Nation.
7. Other artists responding in animated form to the history of film and television include Nancy Davenport,
William Kentridge, Jennifer Levonian and Jennifer and Kevin McCoy.
8. Giorgio Agamben (1993: 347) argues: ‘Tricksters or fakes, assistants or ‘toons, they are the examples of
the coming community’ (Coming Community 7). Similarly, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2005),
suggesting that democracy today needs ‘new weapons’, invoke a variety of theatrical tactics including
274 Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6(3)

carnival, mimicry, kiss-ins, but alone, they suggest, these are not sufficient; they need to be rendered
‘constructive, expansive, and constituent’. One key question that needs addressing is how the ‘new’ and
future-oriented ‘toon-politics invoked here differs from the kind of theatrical protest practiced by the Yip-
pies and other protestors against the Vietnam War.

Acknowledgements
My thanks to: Abigail Hinsman for help with research assistance; Annabelle Honess Roe for sharing
her dissertation with me; and to Tess Takahashi, for perpetually creating spaces for thinking about these
questions.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

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Karen Beckman is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern Media in the Department of
the History of Art and the Program in Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of
Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (Duke University Press, 2003), and Crash: Cinema and the
Politics of Speed and Stasis (Duke University Press, 2010). She is co-editor of two volumes: Still Moving:
Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma (Duke University Press, 2008) and Picture This! Writing
With Photography with Liliane Weissberg (forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press). She is also one of
the editors of the journal Grey Room.