Narrative and Truth in the Documentary

Cynthia D. Bond, The John Marshall Law School, has published Documenting Law: Reality & Representation on Trial. Here is the abstract.

Documentary films frequently address issues of social and political injustice; thus, however indirectly, implicating law as their subject. Documentary film and legal process also frequently share formal similarities as they both seek to reconstruct actual events through representational techniques. Thus, notions of the truth are deeply overdetermined in documentary films about law. To most lay spectators, such documentaries are truth-seeking systems (documentary film) depicting a truth-seeking system (law). Thus, it is particularly useful to analyze the impressions of law lay spectators gain (or confirm) from these films since, given the truth claims of documentaries, spectators may more fully trust images of law in them than in fiction film. Documentaries engage different strategies in ignoring, negotiating, or acknowledging the overdetermined sources of truth they contain. First, many documentaries mount a competing narrative of truth, contesting the ability of legal processes to adequately find the truth (a dynamic this article dubs “Film vs. Law”). Alternatively, documentaries may contest law’s truth claims without fully supplanting them with their own purportedly superior access to truth (“Film and Law”). These films both critique the truth claims of the legal process while acknowledging the inevitably open-ended and provisional nature of the events they reference. Finally, documentaries may underline the shared representational techniques of law and film to reveal the vexed nature of accessing the truth in both realms (“Film = Law”). These three documentary strategies are defined in part by the stylistic choices the films make, and by the on- and off-screen performance of the filmmaker’s relationship with his or her subject. Yet regardless of a particular documentary film style, the notion of the truth of depicted events is an inescapable element of the documentary narrative.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Why Films About the Wrong Side of the Law Are So Appealing

From the New York Times, an article on the history and evolution of the crime film.

Bollywood Film

Michael H. Hoffmeier, University of Mississippi, has published Rule of Law in Bollywood Translations of ‘Devdas’ and ‘Parineeta’ at Florida Entertainment Law Review 81 (2009).

This article discusses transformation of "Devdas" and "Parineeta" narratives in multiple commercial Hindi film adaptations, focusing on changing role of law and lawyers over time.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Some New Books Of Interest To Law and Humanities Scholars

Laurence Grove, Comics in French: The European Bande Dessinee in Context (Berghan Books).

Marlisa Santos, The Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and "Film Noir" (Lexington Books).

Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities (State University of New York Press).

Searching For Charlie Chan

The new book out on Charlie Chan, the fictional detective, is getting good reviews. Author Yunte Huang explores the origins, influence and meaning of Chan in Charlie Chan:
The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (Norton, 2010).

Charlie Chan was the hero of a number of murder mysteries written by Earl Derr Biggers, and brought to the screen during the 1930s by Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, and Roland Winters. Louisiana-born Mantan Moreland also starred in the Chan films as the detective's chauffeur (although Mr. Moreland was a talented actor who made a number of other movies). Charlie Chan even made it into the Saturday morning cartoon line-up.
For more about Chan see the website CharlieChan.net and the Charlie Chan Family Home.

Jill Lepore writes about the inspiration for the character in Chan, the Man: On the Trail of the Honorable Detective here for the New Yorker.

More on Asian image and portrayals on film in Gina Marchetti, Romance and the "yellow peril" : race, sex, and discursive strategies in Hollywood fiction (University of California Press, 1993).

Soap, Soap, Soap, Soap, Soap, Soap, Soap, Soap, Soap....

From the Atlantic Monthly: the lingering effects of the soap opera, even as soap operas bite the dust. All those dasterdly evil twins! All those lawsuits! All those plots to murder someone! All that passion! Where did it go? Reality shows. And movies about soap operas--sorry, daytime dramas. Think Tootsie, and Soapdish.

Leopold and Leob in History and Popular Culture

Edward Larson, Pepperdine University School of Law, has published An American Tragedy: Retelling the Leopold-Loeb Story in Popular Culture, at 50 American Journal of Legal History 119-156 (April 2008/2010). Here is the abstract.

This Article scans the cultural history of an American tragedy: the Leopold and Loeb murder case. In what has widely been referred to as "the crime of the century," teenagers Richard Loeb and Nathan F. Leopold, Jr., under the counsel of the experienced and successful defense attorney Clarence Darrow, pled guilty to the 1924 abduction and murder of Bobby Franks, a child of a wealthy Chicago family. Due to Darrow's advocacy, both defendants were spared the death penalty, and given life sentences instead. Sensational details about the crime, the suspects, and the criminal proceedings were enthusiastically reported by the six daily newspapers published in Chicago during this time.

This Articles focuses on the evolution of several distinct personas of the suspected killers, three of which were created by the print media as they covered the story from confession to sentencing. One of the personas developed by newspaper articles was that of both suspects, but particularly Leopold, as self-conceived Nietzschean supermen, exempt from normal moral, ethical, and legal standards. Later, this persona was more fully developed in popular novels and major motion pictures based on the Leopold and Loeb story. The second persona developed by the print media is that of the precocious teenage thrill-seekers. This persona, which was seen to exemplify the indulged, immoral youth culture of the 1920s that was enjoyed by wealthy young men, was also later developed in artistic interpretations of the story of the crime. The print media also presented a third persona in its stories about the criminal proceedings against Leopold and Loeb. With the assistance of East Coast alienists who adopted a Freudian approach to psychology, as well as two physicians, defense attorney Darrow created and developed this third persona during the hearing - that of deeply disturbed youth who were emotionally unable to control their actions. Darrow used this image of Leopold and Loeb as deeply troubled boys to persuade the judge to not sentence the defendants to death. It has reappeared in later artistic presentations of the episode.

In addition to the three personas developed in the print media, the Article also discusses two other personas that have evolved since the original events took place in 1924. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the sexual aspect of Leopold's and Loeb's relationship was subject to increased scrutiny. With this came the development, through plays, movies and other artistic portrayals of the events leading up to the crime, of a gay persona for both Leopold and Loeb; particularly, a persona of repressed lovers. Finally, Leopold himself, in telling his own story through magazine articles and a popular autobiography, created for himself a new persona: that of a model prisoner who deserved parole.

The highly publicized crime, prosecution, and punishment of Leopold and Loeb have served as a seemingly endless source of material and inspiration for American writers, dramatists, and social commentators. Because of continued interest in these events, they, together with attorney Clarence Darrow, have remained celebrities whose stories have inspired novelists, playwrights, poets, essayist and artists well into the new century. Perhaps more than any other trial in American history, the Leopold and Loeb case has served as an ongoing inspiration for the American imagination.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising

A friend at the University of Lodz sent this trailer for a digital film which commemorates the 60th Anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The Warsaw Rising Museum (English description here)commemorates the event, which began against the Soviet Army August 1, 1944 and lasted until October 2, 1944. When the Soviets finally entered the city in January 1945, over 85 percent of the city was in ruins. While the number of civilian deaths is unknown, estimates range up to 200,000. August 1 is now a Polish national holiday.

More about the film's premiere here.


Thanks to Dr. Marek Tracz-Tryniecki, University of Lodz, for alerting me to news of the film.

Yet Who Would Have Thought The Old Man To Have Had So Much Blood In Him...

And academics, their readers, and viewers to have had so much interest in the horror film. Well, apparently they do, according to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which documents the continuing stream of titles on the genre. What's in the pipeline? Steffen Hantke's American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (University Press of Mississippi), Thomas Fahy's collection The Philosophy of Horror (University Press of Kentucky), Wheeler Winston Dixon's A History of Horror (Rutgers University Press) and much, much, more. To bed, to bed, to bed, with all these great tomes to read, and all these films and books to visit and re-visit.

Racial Representation in Film

Cynthia D. Bond, John Marshall Law School, has published Laws of Race/Laws of Representation: The Construction of Race and Law in Contemporary American Film , at 11 Texas Review of Entertainment & Sports Law 219 (2010). Here is the abstract.

Within hours of the soul-stirring and nation-lifting election of Barack Obama as president, journalists and pundits were announcing the demise of all prior notions of race in America. Even during the campaign itself, narratives of a "post-racial" America were bandied about. But the historic nature of Obama’s ascendance does not obliterate or transcend the vast history of race and racial representation in America. The representational techniques of the construction of both law and race in popular film are deeply interdependent. Both law and film are story-telling, narrative systems. Race is also a narrative system in which visual representation is key. The significance of the visual apprehension of race is deeply relevant to the legal construction of race as well. (For example, in early citizenship cases and racial “passing” cases which persisted through the latter part of the 20th century.) Since society constructs racial categories in large part by visual identification and experience, all visual media, including film, necessarily participate in the constitution of race. Thus, films do not simply depict supposedly free-standing, objective, racial categories naturalized by the dominant discourse, but instead actually participate in the creation of race. As part of standard Hollywood practice, the mainstream film audience is constructed through identification with a norm of “whiteness.” Since that audience, when viewing a law film, is actively involved in constituting the law as part of its spectatorship, it follows that mainstream films construct law from the perspective of white privilege. The consequences and effects of this cinematic construction of law are many. This article discusses three main effects: 1) the raced construction of the lawyer-hero; 2) the denial or displacement of the law’s role in constructing race and race-based discrimination; and 3) the suppression or revision of politics and political history.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A Legal Analysis of "A Clockwork Orange"

Daniel Albahary has published A Legal Analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and What it Means to Modern America. Here is the abstract.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, “A Clockwork Orange,” is a shocking and fascinating film. Upon its initial release, it was rated “X” in the United States before it being re-edited to obtain an “R” rating. Beyond its cinematic worth the intense violence and misogyny it embodies and suggests, however, the film reveals much about the then and now contemporary attitudes towards criminal punishment prevailing in western democracies. Law professor Robert Batey claims that the film provides a vehicle “for students to examine fundamental aspects of criminal law.” Taken to the next level, the film also reminds us of the many international and domestic legal questions provoked with respect to human subject experimentation and the creation of the Nuremberg Code following the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War, the Belmont Report in the United States following the notorious Tuskegee experiments, as well as the infamous MKUltra program sanctioned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The film remains, in some sense, timeless for these reasons. But it is even more significant because the Kafkaesque and dystopian prophecy of the future it portends may be extant in modern day America. The film is consumed by themes of maintaining law and order, reducing criminality, and identifying appropriate forms of punishment for criminal violence and deviant behavior. On a deeper level, the film questions the roles of society and government in creating the social and legal realities in which we live.

“A Clockwork Orange” thus may not only be Kubrick’s quixotic fantasy of violence and brutal misogyny but more the ideological suggestion of a pseudo-fascistic incarcerative police state that may one day arise in America and other Western democracies in response to violent criminal or deviant behavior, or perhaps even with the aim of “brain-washing.” Although mostly the work of English authors such as Anthony Burgess, George Orwell, and Alan Moore, the idea of a reemerging fascist state that dubiously imprisons and variously tortures its citizens is not unimaginable in the eyes of Americans such as Naomi Wolf.

Echoing this possibility, “A Clockwork Orange” is a surreal, often uncomfortable portrayal of a once respectable society in social and legal decay. The film presents a frightening picture of a society where violence has begun to tighten its stranglehold on the populace. While a sturdy police and authoritarian state presence exists to combat the persistent violence, society is on the brink of total chaos as hooligans ruthlessly threaten law and order. The central themes and events of the film illustrate the film’s continued relevance to contemporary issues including the desire to combat youth violence, the desire for social, moral, and legal order, the desire for justice, the desire to prevent cruel and unusual punishment, as the well as the desire to meet the goals of retribution and rehabilitation in criminal punishment.

Produced almost 40 years ago, “A Clockwork Orange,” as an expression of political culture, still resonates in contemporary American society. The themes and events present in the film presciently serve as indicia of the social, political and legal reality the nation may find itself in if the government does not cease to circumvent the rule of law in some cases, does not continue to zealously protect the natural and constitutional rights of citizens, and alter its current practice of incarcerating increasing numbers of prisoners in others.

The paper performs a legal analysis of the film and explore the relevancy it has for modern day America. While some issues may remain unresolved, it adopts a normative view of the law and, mirroring the central events of the film, analyzes the retributivist nature of juvenile punishment, the importance of preventing cruel and unusual punishment, and the legal status of the forced administration of psychotropic drugs to prisoners.

The full text is not available on SSRN.

Rear Window

Michael Ruse stands up for the Hitchcock classic Rear Window here.

A Clockwork Orange

Daniel Albahary has published A Legal Analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and What it Means to Modern America. Here is the abstract.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, “A Clockwork Orange,” is a shocking and fascinating film. Upon its initial release, it was rated “X” in the United States before it being re-edited to obtain an “R” rating. Beyond its cinematic worth the intense violence and misogyny it embodies and suggests, however, the film reveals much about the then and now contemporary attitudes towards criminal punishment prevailing in western democracies. Law professor Robert Batey claims that the film provides a vehicle “for students to examine fundamental aspects of criminal law.” Taken to the next level, the film also reminds us of the many international and domestic legal questions provoked with respect to human subject experimentation and the creation of the Nuremberg Code following the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War, the Belmont Report in the United States following the notorious Tuskegee experiments, as well as the infamous MKUltra program sanctioned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The film remains, in some sense, timeless for these reasons. But it is even more significant because the Kafkaesque and dystopian prophecy of the future it portends may be extant in modern day America. The film is consumed by themes of maintaining law and order, reducing criminality, and identifying appropriate forms of punishment for criminal violence and deviant behavior. On a deeper level, the film questions the roles of society and government in creating the social and legal realities in which we live.

“A Clockwork Orange” thus may not only be Kubrick’s quixotic fantasy of violence and brutal misogyny but more the ideological suggestion of a pseudo-fascistic incarcerative police state that may one day arise in America and other Western democracies in response to violent criminal or deviant behavior, or perhaps even with the aim of “brain-washing.” Although mostly the work of English authors such as Anthony Burgess, George Orwell, and Alan Moore, the idea of a reemerging fascist state that dubiously imprisons and variously tortures its citizens is not unimaginable in the eyes of Americans such as Naomi Wolf.

Echoing this possibility, “A Clockwork Orange” is a surreal, often uncomfortable portrayal of a once respectable society in social and legal decay. The film presents a frightening picture of a society where violence has begun to tighten its stranglehold on the populace. While a sturdy police and authoritarian state presence exists to combat the persistent violence, society is on the brink of total chaos as hooligans ruthlessly threaten law and order. The central themes and events of the film illustrate the film’s continued relevance to contemporary issues including the desire to combat youth violence, the desire for social, moral, and legal order, the desire for justice, the desire to prevent cruel and unusual punishment, as the well as the desire to meet the goals of retribution and rehabilitation in criminal punishment.

Produced almost 40 years ago, “A Clockwork Orange,” as an expression of political culture, still resonates in contemporary American society. The themes and events present in the film presciently serve as indicia of the social, political and legal reality the nation may find itself in if the government does not cease to circumvent the rule of law in some cases, does not continue to zealously protect the natural and constitutional rights of citizens, and alter its current practice of incarcerating increasing numbers of prisoners in others.

The paper performs a legal analysis of the film and explore the relevancy it has for modern day America. While some issues may remain unresolved, it adopts a normative view of the law and, mirroring the central events of the film, analyzes the retributivist nature of juvenile punishment, the importance of preventing cruel and unusual punishment, and the legal status of the forced administration of psychotropic drugs to prisoners.

The author has not provided the full text, or an indication of where it is available. Interested persons might try emailing him.

Hollywood and the Rhetoric of Race

Cynthia D. Bond, The John Marshall Law School, has published Laws of Race/Laws of Representation: The Construction of Race and Law in Contemporary American Film, at 11 Texas Review of Entertainment & Sports Law 219 (2010). Here is the abstract.

Within hours of the soul-stirring and nation-lifting election of Barack Obama as president, journalists and pundits were announcing the demise of all prior notions of race in America. Even during the campaign itself, narratives of a "post-racial" America were bandied about. But the historic nature of Obama’s ascendance does not obliterate or transcend the vast history of race and racial representation in America. The representational techniques of the construction of both law and race in popular film are deeply interdependent. Both law and film are story-telling, narrative systems. Race is also a narrative system in which visual representation is key. The significance of the visual apprehension of race is deeply relevant to the legal construction of race as well. (For example, in early citizenship cases and racial “passing” cases which persisted through the latter part of the 20th century.) Since society constructs racial categories in large part by visual identification and experience, all visual media, including film, necessarily participate in the constitution of race. Thus, films do not simply depict supposedly free-standing, objective, racial categories naturalized by the dominant discourse, but instead actually participate in the creation of race. As part of standard Hollywood practice, the mainstream film audience is constructed through identification with a norm of “whiteness.” Since that audience, when viewing a law film, is actively involved in constituting the law as part of its spectatorship, it follows that mainstream films construct law from the perspective of white privilege. The consequences and effects of this cinematic construction of law are many. This article discusses three main effects: 1) the raced construction of the lawyer-hero; 2) the denial or displacement of the law’s role in constructing race and race-based discrimination; and 3) the suppression or revision of politics and political history.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Use of Images and Law

Jessica M. Silbey, Suffolk University Law School, has published Evidence Verité and the Law of Film, at 31 Cardozo Law Review 1257 (2010). Here is the abstract.

This paper explores a puzzle concerning the authority of certain images that increasingly find themselves at the center of legal disputes: surveillance or “real time” film images that purport to capture an event about which there is a dispute. Increasingly, this kind of “evidence verité” is used in United States courts of law as the best evidence of what happened. Film footage of arrests, criminal confessions, photographs of crime scenes (during and after) is routinely admitted into court as evidence. It tends to overwhelm all other evidence (e.g., testimonial or documentary) and be immune to critical analysis. Why would this be so?

This paper situates this phenomenon in the current legal United States context, with a brief history of “evidence verité” and its treatment at law. It then compares side-by-side two cultural institutions, photography and law, as examples of institutions with power and influence over public and popular consciousness. How do these two institutions intersect? What patterns of influence and persuasion emerge from the partnership of photographic or filmic images and the role of law? The paper explores these questions by tracing the life of certain iconic public images in hopes that doing so will tell us something about how they came to be iconic: how their circulation and reception in the United States rendered the images meaningful beyond their textual existence. Studying the circulation and recirculation of these photograph images helps make sense of how “real time” images in culture and at law might shape our understanding of important, historic events beyond the facts these images depict.

This paper is not a paper about how we understand images as a psychological or neurological matter. It is a paper about how law and legal processes frame images and how images – especially “real time” images – frame or shape the law. The photographs the paper examines include the “Migrant Mother” from the Great Depression, the bombing of Hiroshima, the flag raising at Iwo Jima during WWII, the Times Square Kiss on VJ day, the US landing on the moon, the first in utero photographs of a human fetus, and images of torture at Abu Ghraib prison.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Bad Boy of Sherwood Forest

From the May 21 New York Times, a consideration of the image of Robin Hood in the movies via newly released DVDs. Dave Kehr writes about prior Robin Hoods as Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett reimagine the olde, olde story.

The website Shadows of Sherwood has links to Robin Hood in Literature. Here is information about the real and mythic Robin, from about.com and more material about the Robin Hood legend, including links to texts, from the Robin Hood Pages.

Putting Your Law School Training To Work

Along with Jim Belushi, Jerry O'Connell will star in the new legal drama, The Defenders, on CBS. Mr. O'Connell is learning whereof he speaks. In addition to having been a successful thespian for some time, he's also a law student at Southwestern Law School. Read more in this post from the ABA Journal. So, he can say, "I'm a law student, AND I play a lawyer on TV."

Tax Lawyers At the Movies

This post probably would have been à propos April 15, but it's still interesting. From Paul Caron's Tax Prof blog, here are "Tax Movies," courtesy of guest blogger Robert G. Nassau at Syracuse Law.

In addition to the films mentioned, I'd suggest such goodies as Catch Me If You Can (2002) (the story of impersonator Frank Abagnale, Jr.), Jean de Florette (1986), Stranger Than Fiction (2006) (an IRS auditor can suddenly hear someone narrating his life), The Main Event (1979) (tax shelter), The Widow's Might (2009) (a widow fights back against property taxes), and Billy Bathgate (1991) (tax evasion). Check out www.imdb.com for additional films on taxes and their effect on life, the universe, and everything.

Rights Talk in Science Fiction

Christine A. Corcos, Louisiana State University Law Center, has published Visits to a Small Planet: Rights Talk in Some Science Fiction Film and Television Series from the 1950s to the 1990s. It is forthcoming in the Stetson Law Review. Here is the abstract.

As early as the seventeenth century, authors, particularly satirists, used the travel essay as a means to examine and critique societies, including their own. If an artist’s government discouraged or banned political or social critique, he was necessarily forced to disguise his criticism as fiction - the more fanciful, the better. This practice has carried over to the genre of science fiction (SF).

While authors fictionalize many of the elements in SF to make their stories more exciting and bizarre, some elements have made a transition into popular culture because they resonate with the human popular imagination. As a result, many individuals believe that the elements actually exist. Among them are popular methods of alien transportation, such as the rocket (often pictured as the “rocket to Mars”), the flying saucer, and the alien being interested in making contact with a human, either for benign or (more often) nefarious purposes. The idea that an alien means to visit Earth in order to destroy the planet or to cause us harm is one that quickly becomes a theme in novels, films, and television beginning in the mid-twentieth century, fed by actual political and cultural events.

These ideas resonate with human imaginations or they are embraced by spiritual beliefs. Viewers’ familiarity with real life space travel, which increases plausibility as well as the maintenance of traditional SF memes, allow SF writers to use the genre’s conventions to continue to critique society.

SF authors continually use human beings as the yardstick by which to measure aliens. So, while such films and shows may seem to invite us, through the use of the alien lens, to critique human society, they actually invite us to re-examine human society from a different, albeit a human, perspective. As the genre critiques human society from two perspectives, SF is actually well suited to examine the issue of civil and human rights.

This Article examines the critique of human society’s development and use of such rights within a sampling of SF film and television programs from the 1950s to the 1990s. Part II analyzes the treatment of civil rights within the alien invasion and infiltration narratives of the time period. Part III discusses the transition from the foreign alien-invasion narrative to the domestic alien narrative and its effect on the treatment of civil rights. Part IV explores the civil rights issues represented in the friendly alien-visitor narrative of the 1960s television show My Favorite Martian. Part V examines the civil rights questions the late 1980s and early 1990s television series Alien Nation poses. Part VI analyzes the civil rights issues the 1990s television series 3rd Rock from the Sun raises.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Constitutional Law in the Movies

David Ray Papke, Marquette University Law School, has published Oil and Water Do Not Mix: Constitutional Law and American Popular Culture, as Marquette Law School Legal Studies Paper No. 10-09. Here is the abstract.

Why have most fictional films and television series purportedly involving constitutional issues been commercial and artistic failures? Focusing in order on “First Monday in October” (1981); “The Pelican Brief” (1993); and “The Court” and “First Monday,” two short-lived American television series from 2002, this article suggests the works fail not because of a lack of creativity but rather because of the way they were produced. In particular, the article argues the culture industry’s use of stock characters, devotion to familiar conventions, and reliance on established genres virtually preclude anything resembling meaningful constitutional deliberation and discussion. These aspects of pop cultural production are industrial imperatives, but stock characters, familiar conventions, and established genres limit the intellectual range and depth of films and television series. These limitations are especially pronounced when consideration of the Constitution is a possibility.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.