Spin
For as long as filmmakers have pointed cameras at the world, they have edited their images to make points. And for just as long other filmmakers with other agendas have reedited those films. Surrealists whimsically collage unconscious links, deconstructionists yank at Oz’s curtain, and propagandists revise their enemies’ salvos. Back in 1927 Esther Shub skewered the czarists using Nicholas II’s home movies to reframe Russian history through a communist lens. And in 1940 the U.S. War Department recruited Luis Bunuel and the Museum of Modern Art to undermine the spectacle of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi films.
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Blooper specials of stars flubbing their lines and stumbling over props have trivialized the impact of outtakes–seeing makeup applied to the president’s face hardly demystifies the oval office. Springer does sneak a peek at correspondent Andrea Mitchell’s acne scars when an NBC camera operator zooms in for an extreme close-up to set focus prior to a live shot from Saint Louis, but his quarry is the more serious media leak, the kind that oozes calculation and collusion.
Springer narrates Spin without the leftish hysteria you might expect from such a hacking-the-hegemony undertaking, though in a rare stretch he tries to link Rodney King, the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the ascendancy of CNN star Larry King “as the father of talk-show democracy.” While showing the local coverage of the LA riots, Springer observes, “The voiceless scenes from South Central LA, where nearly 50 percent of the children live in poverty, was contextualized by $600,000-a-year TV news anchors.” Yet he never identifies his own status as a media player and never discloses his own economic class standing–which would presumably contextualize his own choice of clips.
True enough, as Springer discovered when he tried to get Spin on the air. PBS’s POV series has turned it down twice for national broadcast, but Free Speech TV, a cable service based in Boulder, Colorado, has distributed it to some 50 public-access stations around the country. A national uplink to a public-television satellite may be arranged soon, allowing Spin to become a feed itself.
