Reading Assignment: "Video Confessions," Renov

CONTEMPORARY VIDEO

PRACTICES

Michael Renov &. Erika Suderburg, e d i t o r s

I University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London

Copyright 1996 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

A French-language version of chapter 6 appeared in Passage de ]'image (Paris: Editions du Centre

Pompidou, 1990), translated and reprinted by permission; chapter 9 first appeared in Lynn Hershman:

Chimera Monographie, ed. Lynn Hershman (Montbeliard: Editions du Centre International de

Creation Video, 1992), copyright David E. James; a French-language version of chapter 11 first appeared

in L'Entre-Images (Paris: Editions de la Difference, 1990), translated and reprinted by permission;

an earlier version of chapter 22 appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video 15, no. 1 (1993): 15-26,

copyright Harwood Academic Publishers, by permission; "Slipping Between" copyright 1991 by Sandra P.

Hahn, by permission.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material in this book. The

publishers ask copyright holders to contact them if permission has inadvertently not been sought or

if proper acknowledgment has not been made.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or

otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Resolutions: contemporary video practices J Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg, editors.

p. em.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8166-2327-9 (alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8166-2330-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Video recordings. I. Renov, Michael, 1950- II. Suderburg, Erika.

PN1992.935.R47 1996

384.55'8 --dc20

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

95-10972

VIDEO CONFESSIONS

Michael Renov

Every fidelis of either sex shall after the attainment of years of discretion separately confess his sins

with all fidelity to his priest at least once in the year . ... Let the priest be discreet and cautious, and

let him after the manner of skilled physicians pour wine and oil upon the wounds of the injured man,

diligently inquiring the circumstances alike of the sinner and of the sin, by which he may judiciously

understand what counsel he ought to give him, and what sort of remedy to apply, making use of var­

ious means for the healing of the sick man.

- CANON 21, Fourth Lateran Council of 12151

Confession increasingly takes the place of penance. This development can best be recognized by con­

sidering the fact that, in its early period, the Church ordered the sinner to make a public confession

as an exercise of penance. Modern Protestantism actually puts coming to terms with one's own con­

science in the place of the external confession, thus unconsciously preparing for the future develop­

ment that will go beyond confession and perhaps replace religion by other social institutions.

- THEODOR REIK, The Compuls ion to Confes s (1925)2

Dear Lord, I'm sorry I fight with my mother, but my underwear is my own business and the busi­

ness of my audience. It ain't that yellow.

- GEORGE KUCHAR, Cult of the Cubicles (1987)

7 8

THE CONFESSIONAL SUBJECT

In an interview shortly after the publication of his groundbreaking first volume of The

History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault suggested a trajectory of continuity that linked

his latest work with such earlier projects as Madness and Civilization. In both cases,

the problem was to find out how certain questions-of madness or sexuality- " could

have been made to operate in terms of discourses of truth, that is to say, discourses hav­

ing the status and function of true discourses. "3 For in his work on sexuality, Foucault

had discovered "this formidable mechanism ... the machinery of the confession, " by

which he meant "all those procedures by which the subject is incited to produce a dis­

course of truth about his sexuality which is capable of having effects on the subject him­

sel£. "4 Like autobiography, with which it can be aligned, s confession was, for Foucault,

a discourse "in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement, " but

unlike other autobiographical forms (for example, the diary, journal, or Montaignian

essay), confession was, by definition, "a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship,

for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is

not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes

and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and recon­

cile. " And, finally, confession was a ritual "in which the expression alone, independent­

ly of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who

articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs,

liberates him, and promises him salvation. "6

According to Foucault's formulation, psychoanalysis figured as simply

the most recent and most scientifically explicit development of a confessional apparatus

that could be traced back to Tertullian and to Augustine. For in all cases, confession was

understood to be a restorative vehicle, of mind or spirit, yet one in which power was

necessarily implicated. In the manner of the Augustinian model ( Augustine's

Confessions, a thirteen-volume work of the late fourth century, is universally cited as

originary), confession could provide "a way to escape madness, to reveal secret, hidden

places, and to face the world with a new and 'easeful' liberty. "? But, according to confes­

sional logic, the cure could be bestowed only through the guarantee of God or psychoan­

alyst; confession required submission to authority, divine or secular. Significantly, in

neither case was the confessor the bona fide recipient of the confessant's unburdening.

The priest was only a go-between in the dialogue between God and supplicant, while

the analyst was the site of a transference, the object of "certain intense feelings of affec­

tion which the patient has transferred on to the physician, not accounted for by the lat­

ter's behaviour nor by the relationship involved by the treatment. " 8 The implications of

this dependency-confession as a play of authority, a regulation of desire-were the

provocation for Foucault's critique of confessional "truth-telling. "

A very great deal is at stake in this critique, far more than simply a revi­

sionist view of religious ritual or psychoanalytic practice. As so many critics have

noted, Western epistemology presumes a subject who must submit to the Truth, one

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VIDEO CONFESSIONS

whose substance and identity are constructed in relation to an authoritative Other (the

truth as divine, God as the "transcendental signified, " the final guarantor of meaning). 9

One could then say that the Western subject finds his sweetest repose in confessional

discourse. Moreover, it was not just the individual-as-subject who had been conditioned

by confession, as sacrament or compulsion; social effects followed. In The History of

Sexuality, Foucault traced the in fluence of the confessional mode at the level of the

organization of social life in the West:

We have ... become a singularly confessing society. The confession has

spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education,

family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of every­

day life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one's crimes, one's sins,

one's thoughts and desires, one's illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling,

with the greatest precision, whatever is most dif ficult to tell ... . Western man

has become a confessing animal. lO

Risking a fall into absolutism, such a notion of confession is nonetheless compelling for

the way in which it organizes an extraordinarily dense discursive domain (theological,

juridical, psychoanalytic) articulated around the confessional act into an epistemological

praxis, thoroughly imbued with relations of power.

THE THERAPY OF SELF-EXAMINATION

But few commentators, Foucault chief among them, construct confession solely in

terms of submission to an authorizing and exteriorized source of power; confession has

customarily been assigned a complex therapeutic value. l l Peter Brown, author of the

definitive English-language biography of Augustine, judged the Augustinian model of

confession to be a precursor for the modern obsession for self-scrutiny: "It is this thera­

py of self-examination which has, perhaps, brought Augustine closest to some of the

best traditions of our own age. Like a planet in opposition, he has come as near to us, in

Book Ten of the Confessions, as the vast gulf that separates a modern man from the

culture and religion of the Later Empire can allow. " 12

In the mid-1920s, psychoanalyst Theodor Reik pronounced Augustine

"one of the greatest psychologists of Christianity."13 For Reik, confession was a funda­

mental trope of psychic life, one response to repression: " The general urge of unconscious

material to express itself sometimes assumes the character of a tendency to confess." 14

Functioning at the join of public and private domains, confession as public discourse

(confessional literature or performative display) can be understood either as a kind of

self-interrogation that produces spiritual reconciliation while implicitly challenging

others to ethical action (a theological reading)IS or as an acting out of repressed material

that, when subjected to analysis, can facilitate the transfer of unconscious psychic mate­

rial to the preconscious (a psychoanalytic reading)-therapeutic ends, both of them. And,

8 0

MICHAEL RENOV

of course, therapy has emerged as one of the growth industries of our age. Given an

understanding of the multiform historical role confession has played in the development

of Western thought, how can we now begin to talk about the transformations of confes­

sional culture in the late twentieth century? And what place should we give to video in

this account? Foucault's theorization remains pertinent.

Despite the historical sweep of Foucault's formulations, which take as

their point of departure the advent of the "age of repression " in the seventeenth century,

The History of Sexuality draws our attention to the dynamic and protean character of

confessional utterance, particularly in this century. Far from censoring speech, repres­

sion has produced "a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse, " 16 which, as

Reik notes in the opening epigraph, can find expression outside religion or the thera­

pist's couch. Many commentators have remarked upon the decline of confession in its

most parochial or doctrinal sense: William James, writing at the turn of the century,

refers to "the complete decay of the practice of confession in Anglo- Saxon communi­

ties "; l7 Norberta Valentini and Clara di Meglio, citing a dramatic statistical decline in

the level and frequency of confessional participation in the Italian Church in the 1970s,

deem confession to be "in crisis. " l8

And yet, in the 1990s, confessional discourse proliferates. In what fol­

lows I will look beyond both church and couch to the _aesthetic or cultural domain and

indeed to a very particular corner of that domain-toward independently produced, low­

end video, which I shall position against capital-intensive, industrially organized, mass

market cultural commodities, on film or tape. In doing so, I take as my focus selected

work by independent videomakers working consciously (sometimes parodically) within

the context of confessional and therapeutic discourses. What I will say about video con­

fessions is not, therefore, ontologically grounded. I don't wish to make claims for some­

thing like a confessional potentiality intrinsic to the electronic medium; what I say will

be limited and contingent. And yet I shall argue for a uniquely charged linkage between

"video " and "confession " in the current cultural environment for reasons that I shall

return to later in the chapter.

Regarding the aesthetic domain, it should be said that there are substan­

tial grounds for a turn of the confessional impulse toward specifically artistic ends

(never, of course, to the exclusion of coexistent theological, psychoanalytic, or crimino­

logical contexts). At least since the Greeks, art has been judged capable of yielding

"cathartic " effects for artist and audience alike through the public disclosure of con­

cealed impulses and secret wishes, secondarily revised. Indeed, a large number of books

have been written on the topic of confessional literature (among the chief objects of

inquiry, Augustine, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Rousseau, De Quincey, Dostoyevsky). But in

the latter half of the twentieth century, the vehicles of cultural hegemony have been

transformed dramatically, along the lines of what Raymond Williams has identified as a

kind of ongoing but interstitial struggle of dominant, emergent, and residual cultural

forces. l9 For while it can be said that there has been an explosion of confessional and

therapeutic discourses within the public sphere of American culture, that ef florescence

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VIDEO CONFESSIONS

has been less "literary " than popular cultural-in the form of tabloid journalism, talk

radio, and commercial television.

Mimi White's insightful book on American television's place within this

emerging landscape of public confession, Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in

American Television, examines a range of T V formats (daytime soaps, religious broad­

casting, game shows, prime time series, advice shows, shop-at-home television), all of

which decisively if unpredictably generate narrative and narrational positions for their

audience.2o White ingeniously shows how television programs not only borrow from the

world of psychological theory and clinical practice, but also "construct new therapeutic

relations."21 Following closely on Foucault's premise that the production of confessional

knowledge is equally an exercise of power and regulation, Tele-Advising nonetheless

points to the multiplicity of subject effects created by these T V therapies, outlining as

well the possibilities of resistant positions.

But I want to distinguish between White's field of inquiry and my own,

between the worlds of broadcast television and independent video, and thus to begin to

account for the very different confessional manifestations produced in each domain.

Throughout White's discussion, it is clear that confession is not only narrativized but

commodified. (One could say, as Nick Browne has argued, that the master narrative of

television, in line with its "supertextual " function, is commodification.)22 Given the

profit orientation of broadcast television, all confessional transactions-from Dr. Ruth

to The Love Connection-are also commercial ones. If successful, the show's presenta­

tion of embarrassing disclosures of newlywed couples entices a generous share of the

viewing audience and thus higher advertising rates from sponsors. The lifeblood of such

commercial ventures must be mass appeal, a requirement to which confession responds

if we may judge by the number and variation of talk therapy vehicles. These therapeutic

discourses offer illustration of Reik's characterization of confession as a kind of repeti­

tion compulsion23 (11everyone confesses over and over again to everybody else " says

White of T V talk formats),24 only these secrets are made available to home audiences

rather than to professional auditor-confessors. As participatory as televisual therapy may

appear to be (11telling one's story on television is part of the process of recovery "),2S

there can never be a thoroughgoing disengagement from the consumer culture of which

the confessional scene is a support. As we shall see, there is a rather different dynamic

to be discerned in the realm of video confession.

CAMERA: INSTRUMENT OF CONFESSION

We have learned from Freud that verbal presentations are necessary to make

consciousness possible. It is only the confession that enables us to recognize

preconsciously what the repressed feelings and ideas once meant and what

they still mean for us, thanks to the indestructibility and timelessness pecu­

liar to the unconscious processes. By the confession we become acquainted

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MICHAEL RENOV

with ourselves. It offers the best possibility for self-understanding and self­

acceptance. - THE 0 D 0 R R E I K, T h e Com p u 1 s i on t o C on f e s s ( 2 0 5 )

, Yes, the camera deforms, but not from the moment that it becomes an accom­

plice. At that point it has the possibility of doing something I couldn't do if

the camera wasn't there: it becomes a kind of psychoanalytic stimulant which

lets people do things they wouldn't otherwise do. - JEAN RoucH 26

Chronique d'un ete (1961), Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's monumental experiment in

direct cinema, can also be seen as a milestone in the development of "camera confes­

sions " in the documentary mode, an embryonic instance of what I have elsewhere called

"techno-analysis. "27 There are two key confessional scenes enacted in the film: Marilou's

face-to-face encounters with Morin, in which corruscating self-inquisition brings her to

the edge of emotional collapse, and Holocaust survivor Marceline's soliloquy of wrench­

ing wartime memory delivered to a Nagra she carries in her handbag as she strolls

through Les Halles. During Chronique's famous penultimate sequence, these are two of

the most criticized moments of the film, as the subjects themselves argue over the sin­

cerity of the personal testimony and the film's overall merits. The filmmakers, although

far from sanguine about the prospects of success for their experiment, are convinced that

they are onto something. In Rouch's words:

Very quickly I discovered the camera was something else; it was not a brake

but let's say, to use an automobile term, an accelerator. You push these peo­

ple to confess themselves and it seemed to us without any limit. Some of the

public who saw the film [Chronique] said the film was a film of exhibitionists.

I don't think so. It's not exactly exhibitionism: it's a very strange kind of con­

fession in front of the camera, where the camera is, let's say, a mirror, and also

a window open to the outside.28

The camera is for Rouch a kind of two-way glass that retains a double function: it is a

window that delivers the profilmic to an absent gaze and, at the same moment, a reflec­

tive surface that reintroduces us to ourselves. Rouch's insight brilliantly anticipates what

the video apparatus (with the playback monitor mounted alongside the camera) realizes.

As founding a moment as Rouch's experiments may be in the history of

filmic confession, a crucial break occurs when the camera as confessional instrument is

taken up by the confessant herself. In this configuration, the camera becomes the "cam­

era-stylo " first described by Alexandre Astruc, a moving-image equivalent to the pen,

which has so assiduously transcribed two millenia of confessional discourses. There are

indeed exemplary instances in which filmmakers have committed to film the ebb and

flow of conscience and moral evaluation: Jonas Mekas, for one, whose ongoing project,

the "Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, " reinscribes and puts to the test the artist's life since

his emigration to the United States in 1949. In a film such as Lost, Lost, Lost (1975),

Mekas lays his narration, steeped in the memory of the people and places we are shown,

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VIDEO CONFESSIONS

over footage excerpted from fourteen years of filming (1949-63). The 11present-tense "

voice interrogates 11past " images through a temporally disjunctive diaristic method that

produces the confession of his own cinematic practice as a compulsion to remember:

11lt's my nature now to record, to try to keep everything I am passing through ... to

keep at least bits of it . .. . I've lost too much .... So now I have these bits that I've

passed through. "29

But the first-person, artisanal style that has been refined through five

decades of the New American Cinema ( Maya Deren, Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Bruce

Baillie, and so on) has always strained against an industrial bias as economically ground­

ed as it is ideological.3D The legendary spring-wound Bolex-so light, so durable-and

even Brakhage's hand-wrought signatures, etched into the emulsion itself, could not free

the cineaste from a dependence on large-scale manufacturers who could discontinue

stocks (even whole formats) if profit margins sagged. Then, too, there were the vagaries

of the local labs to contend with.

The development of the Sony portapak in the mid-1960s provided visual

artists with a greater possibility for relative autonomy. Not that the portapak, designed

and manufactured as it was by a major Japanese conglomerate, and its descendants can

be deemed a more artisanal format than 16mm film. Indeed, the potential for the hand­

crafting so beloved by 16mm and 8mm enthusiasts has been lost in the transition to

electronic pixels.31 In exchange, the independent videomaker or home consumer has

been relieved of certain mediating contingencies-material and temporal-that separate

shooting from viewing, production from exhibition. It is the systematic solipsism and

11immediacy " of video (the latter, in particular, a notion to be approached with much

caution for its implicit metaphysical implications) that suit it so well to the confession­

al impulse. No technician need see or hear the secrets confided to tape. None but the

invited enter the loop of the video confession.

T H E E L E C T R 0 N I C C 0 N F E S S I 0 N A L 32

In its nearly thirty years of existence, the mass-marketed video apparatus has succeeded

in colonizing the business of the preservation of family ritual (home video, wedding

video), of information exchange (dating services, instructional media-from closed-circuit

patient education in hospitals and clinics to aerobics tapes), and, in a less systematic

fashion, of do-it-yourself or 11techno-therapy." All of these are nonfiction applications

consistent with that most elemental of documentary functions, the preservational.33

Certain of the above-named instances combine preservation with persuasion or instruc­

tion (for example, health education or exercise tapes), while others (such as the home

video) provide a moving-image catalog of domestic life to be stored and perused at will.

But, compared with generic "home video, " video confessions are deictic. ( Most of the

confessional video with which I am familiar is also artfully crafted. The distinctions I

am delimiting here are based primarily on discursive function rather than aesthetic

value.) Confessions of the sort that I am examining can also be functionally opposed to

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MICHAEL RENOV

other preservational formats, such as the wedding video, in that they are autobiographical

and counterindustrial. 34

It is necessary to resolve the precise object of the present inquiry with

even a finer grain. There have, for example, been some important confessional works in

video made outside the autobiographical ambit, such as Maxie Cohen's Intimate

Interviews: Sex in Less than Two Minutes ( 19 84) and Anger ( 19 86). In these pieces,

Cohen expertly (and from off-camera) elicits the disclosure of intense emotion from a

series of interview subjects. In Anger, for example, a man calling himself " Master

James, " a black hood masking his features, confesses to the pleasures he experiences

through the whipping of compliant females; he traces his sexual preference to a mother

who, although they shared a single room, punished him as a boy for looking at her

unclothed body. Another man admits on-camera to four murders. While he displays no

remorse for the crimes, only one of which he claims to have committed in anger, he

does evidence an ironic self-knowledge. He describes the irreparable atrophy of his liver

tissue caused by years of alcoholism and notes that Eastern medicine aligns that organ

with one emotion-anger. In each of Anger's seven sequences, people (as individuals,

couples, or gangs) speak about an emotion that is very near the surface; anger is the

lever whose expression frees discourse from repression. The confessing subjects have

been raped, slashed with knives, betrayed, abused, and abandoned and have responded

with tears, embitterment, or violence. The unresolved emotion they have lived with has

in some cases driven them to unspeakable acts, which they nonetheless offer freely to

the camera with only the occasional encouragement from Cohen offscreen. Clearly, as

Riek predicted, confession has taken the place of penance. The subjects seek not forgive­

ness but expressive release in the form of dialogues-between imaged subject and a pres­

ent but unimaged interlocutor-from which only monologues survive. I am suggesting

that first-person video confessions, addressed to an absent confessor-Other, mediated

through an ever-present apparatus, constitute a discursive formation significantly differ­

ent from the truncated dialogue, one that offers particular insight into the specificities

and potentialities of the medium itself.3s

First-person video confessions satisfy Foucault's formulation of confes­

sion as "a discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement, "

with the "speaking subject " understood as necessarily and simultaneously the "enunci­

ating subject. " ( Here, enunciation entails the repertoire of tasks required to conceive,

shoot, and edit a confessional tape.) The subjects of Cohen's works are thus "speaking "

but not "enunciating " subjects. Indeed, it might be argued that Anger's subjects, like

those of other documentaries of the interactive mode in which the interview format

prevails, 36 are more spoken than speaking. The distinction is pertinent to my earlier

claim that confessional discourse is particularly well suited to the solipsistic potentiality

of video.

With regard to the therapeutic value of diaristic video confessions, I do

not wish to suggest that these practices provide actual substitutes for professional thera­

pies. For its part, traditional psychoanalytic theory is fairly categorical with regard to

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VIDEO CONFESS I ONS

the distinction between analysis and catharsis or "acting-out, " which Reik, for one,

never accepts as a therapeutic end in itself:

Acting-out, if elevated to be the dominating element of psychoanalysis, rup­

tures the frame of the treatment and transforms the provisional device of ana­

lytical experience into a final phase which is nowhere essentially different

from the experiences "outside." That technique gives the suppressed impuls­

es and wishes, as well as the need for punishment, full grati fication, while we

wish to avoid just that in psychoanalysis, which should, according to Freud,

be accomplished in abstinence.

We said earlier that acting-out is not an emotional end in itself . ...

[T]he analyst reopens to him [the confessant] the way from acting-out to

remembering which we expect. In this sense, acting-out, too, is an uncon­

scious confession in the form of representation or display; its interpretation is

an essential part of analysis.37

Of course, the reference to "abstinence " in the above quotation is indicative of the dis­

tance that separates a monastic Freudianism from the free-for-all that is artistic expres­

sion. It is worth noting that autobiographical forms, particularly in the public realm in

which film and video reception gets defined, are frequently labeled "self-indulgent." The

asceticism that effectuates analysis (and the narrative economy of popular cinema is, in

its own way, ascetic) is anathema to the self-immersion of first-person video confes­

sions, which obsessively track personal truths. It could hardly be otherwise. According

to the Freudian orthodoxy, then, "acting out " (first-person confession) demands its ana­

lytical Other (the analyst-confessor). Could it be, however, that, in the stages of

secondary revision we call editing, the videomaker-confessant has the potential, in

working through the material, to produce, if only implicitly, something like an analysis,

to move from acting out to remembering, from the unconscious to the preconscious or

even to consciousness?

FIRST-PERSON VIDEO CONFESSIONS

A particularly telling instance of the transition from Rouch's incitational camera to

first-person video confession occurs in Arthur Ginsberg's notorious documentary soap

opera The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd (1970-71), in which the San Francisco­

based videographer set out to chronicle the vicissitudes of a former porn queen turned

independent filmmaker and a one-eyed, bisexual junkie who choose to marry and live

their lives before the camera in a Videofreex version of An American Family.38 When,

months down the line, celebrity and the connubial luster begin to wane, Carel and Ferd

wrest the camera from " Awful Arthur, " the better to probe the depths of their unhappi­

ness through a one-on-one confrontation. ( It seems that the couple had been "seeing a

shrink "- Ferd's description-in the period just previous.)

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MICHAEL RENOV

Toward the end of an hour-long precis of the Continuing Story produced

by W N E T's Television Laboratory (1975), in which a reunited Carel and Ferd provide in­

studio commentary for the edited compilation, the latter-day Carel describes this appro­

priation of the apparatus: " It was important for us to use the camera therapeutically ....

So we took the cameras alone and used them!' ''And Arthur had nothing to do with it?" asks

their on-camera interviewer. " He couldn't use this stuff, " replies Carel, "It was too real."

But the footage is used in the hour-long version (now distributed by

Electronic Arts Intermix). Ferd and Carel in turn focus in unflinching close-up on the

fine gestures and bodily details of the other ( Carel's fiagers nervously flicking ashes

from her cigarette, Ferd's unsmiling lips as he smokes, eats, and talks). The one interro­

gates the other, posing difficult questions from behind the lens, the camera straining to

catch out truths betrayed or, better yet, to get under the skin. It is a kino-eye usage, an

attempt to extend the perfectibility of the human eye to intrapsychic ends. While the

ploy inevitably fails (at least their union-as well as the melodrama-dissolves), The

Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd establishes the paradigm of interpersonal video ther­

apy with an intensity appropriate to the genre.

In the twenty years since the completion of Carel and Ferd, there have

been a great number of first-person video confessions produced by independent artists.

And while I think it important to draw attention to the range and particularities of this

work, I will only be able to discuss a few tapes in any detail. The criterion for selection

is primarily a heuristic one (those pieces that most vividly illustrate a particular discur­

sive strategy or conceptual affiliation). Artists who have produced video confessions of

the sort I have described include Ilene Segalove (The Mom Tapes, 1974-78; The Riot

Tapes, 1983), Skip Sweeney (My Father Sold Studebakers, 1983), George Kuchar (the

Weather Diary series, 1986-); Cult of the Cubicles, 1987), Lynn Hershman (Confessions

of a Chameleon, 1986; Binge, 1987), Vanalyne Green (Trick or Drink, 1984; A Spy in the

House That Ruth Built, 1989), Sadie Benning (virtually all of her work to date, including

If Every Girl Had a Diary, 1989; Me and Rubyfruit, 1989; Jollies, 1990; It Wasn't Love,

1992), Susan Mogul (Everyday Echo Street: A Summer Diary, 1993), and Wendy Clarke

(The Love Tapes project, 1978-94; the "One on One " series, 1990-91).

Right now I'm sitting here with no cameraman in the room. I'm totally alone.

I would never, ever talk this way if somebody were here. It's almost as if, if

somebody were in the room, it would insure lying ... just like eating alone. I

think that we've become kind of a society of screens, of different layers that

keep us from knowing the truth, as if the truth is almost unbearable and too

much for us to deal with, just like our feelings. So we deal with things through

replications, and through copies, through screens, through simulations,

through facsmiles, and through fiction ... and through faction.

- LYNN HERSHMAN, Binge

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VIDEO CONFESSIONS

Lynn Hershman's on-camera monologues in the various entries of her Electronic Diary

(19 85- 89) tend toward the overtly confessional. Her pronouncements in Binge, as quoted

above, certainly lay out some of the issues to be confronted in the analysis of first-person

video confessions. It is a central premise of my argument that taped self-interrogation can

achieve a depth and a nakedness of expression that is difficult to duplicate with a crew

or even a camera operator present. At first glance, the physical isolation of the confes­

sant appears to be at odds with the dynamic of religious and psychoanalytic confession,

each of which requires a confessor. To return to Foucault's characterization, "One does

not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the

interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it,

and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile. "39

This model would seem, however, to apply to work, like Maxie Cohen's,

that depends upon the artist's solicitation and preselection, varying degrees of intimacy

or distance toward the subjects during production, and the introduction of gestural or

verbal cues to induce expansiveness, closure, and the like. But this method entails, pre­

cisely, 11 direction " of the more traditional sort; confession is coaxed and elicited rather

than simply given the opportunity to issue forth as occurs in the first-person mode. In

contrast, the work of the priest or analyst is typically undirected; it is the ear of the

other as an organ of passive listening, mirroring rather than choosing, that facilitates

confession. With the interactive or directed variant, confession is tendered (not always

consciously) to the videomaker herself; confessional discourse of the diaristic sort

addresses itself to an absent, imaginary other. Consider, for example, Cohen's Intimate

Interviews: Sex in Less than Two Minutes, in which four men and women speak directly

to the camera about the personal idiosyncracies of their sexual lives. It is a compressed,

parodic play of souped-up self-disclosure, confession reduced to the very edge of legibili­

ty ( T V-fashion), much in contrast to the extended, purgative narration-glorying in

every pause, every parapraxis-in which Hershman engages in Binge. The latter

approach, through its willingness to give center stage to unexpurgated self-disclosure as

the enunciative act, tells us more about the specific character and potentiality of video

as a medium suited to confession. From this point of view, video can be seen as a format

historically joined to the private and the domestic, a medium capable of supplying inex­

pensive, synch-sound images, a vehicle of autobiography in which the reflex gaze of the

electronic eye can engender an extended, even obsessive, discourse of the self.

From a crudely developmental perspective, one could say that first­

person video confession has simply built on an evolutionary dynamic in which the public

confession initially ordained by medieval church doctrine gave way to a private, one-on­

one ritual. Then, in the sixteenth century, Protestantism eliminated the externalization

of confession as a face-to-face ritual of reconciliation, fostering a kind of spiritual entre­

preneurship. Video preserves and deepens that dynamic of privatization and entrepre­

neurship. Now, with the help of their cameras, videomakers can exhume their deepest

fears and indiscretions all on their own, and then put their neuroses on display. In a

8 8

MICHAEL RENOV

sense, first-person video confession is uniquely suited to its moment. Born of late-stage

capitalism, it endows therapeutic practice with exchange value.

There are other ways to understand the advantage of the first-person

format. As Rouch demonstrated with Marceline's soliloquy in Chronique d'un ete, the

presence of the camera or recorder is sufficient to spur self-revelation. In the case of

video confessions, the virtual presence of a partner-the imagined other effectuated by

the technology-turns out to be a more powerful facilitator of emotion than flesh-and­

blood interlocutors. Camera operators, sound booms, cables, and clapper boards are hard­

ly a boon to soul confession. Hershman's statement, cited at the beginning of this sec­

tion-the claim that she would "never, ever talk this way " if there were another person

in the room-returns us to the heart of the matter.40

Given that Hershman's telling describes the travails of an eating disorder

in which she ravishes a host of "caloric strangers, " frequently in the privacy of her

boudoir, we can assume that the artist knows something about the solitary character of

compulsive behavior. But is the tape simply another repetition of binge behavior or does

it enact a level of analysis sufficient to move it beyond the realm of catharsis or "acting

out " against which Reik warns us? I would argue that the control Hershman exerts over

the structure and design of her tape, signs of secondary revision, suggests that once­

repressed unconscious material has been, at least temporarily, rendered conscious and

malleable. There is also a way in which Hershman refuses to let herself off the hook in

what she shows us of herself. She warns that we are a society that functions most com­

fortably by means of simulation rather than authentic action or emotion. As she intones

her critique of the growing inauthenticity of everyday life ( "so we deal with things

through replications, and through copies "), her imaged self begins to reduplicate itself in

an infinite regress of video boxes. Hershman's self-indictment might also be seen as a

further indication of the analytical insight foreign to brute cathartic displays. Her sense

of the limits of her "cure " -her confession as itself a kind of artful, socially acceptable

repetition of her condition-speaks to the internally contradictory character of confes­

sional discourse, which contains the symptom within the cure.41

While there are many more video confessions deserving of discussion, I

would like to turn to the work of Wendy Clarke, whose twin vocations-as performance

artist-videomaker and as psychotherapist-make her the ideal subject for this inquiry.

Specifically, I want to focus on two of her projects, each of which explores video's con­

fessional and therapeutic potentialities in new and surprising ways. The place to start is

with Clarke's " Love Tapes " project, which, since 197 8, has afforded thousands of indi­

viduals a chance to voice deep emotion through a process of mediated self-interrogation.

The minimalism of the concept is compelling: individuals of every age and background

are given three minutes of tape time in which to speak about what love means to them.

Clarke facilitates rather than directs the process; she supplies her subjects with the

opportunity to make tapes and the requisite tools to accomplish the task. A small

boothlike structure is erected, usually at a public site (for example, a mall, a bus station,

or a prison), containing a chair, a video camera mounted for a frontal medium close-up,

89

VIDEO CONFESSIONS

FIGURE 1 "Love Tapes" set-up. (Drawing by Loring Eutemey.)

and a monitor.42 Each participant

chooses a backdrop and musical

accompaniment as mood dictates

before activating the camera. The

subject is necessarily the first

audience of the piece for it is only

upon the granting of permission

that the tape becomes a part of

the installation-instantly avail­

able for public viewing-and of

the larger project.

Clarke's only

other role is as the bestower of a

single animating word: love. As

"anger " was the incitation for

Cohen, so is "love " the emotional

levering point that explains the power of " The Love Tapes. " It is the mana-word that

spurs confession. 43 The performance produced is undirected but not, I think, unprompt­

ed. I would argue that it is the video apparatus as "pure potentiality "-its capabilities

for preservation, instantaneous replay, repeated consumption, mass duplication, and

public broadcast (all of which have been realized by " The Love Tapes " project)-that

effectuates response. Admittedly, the myriad soliloquys collected by Clarke are not so

pointedly therapeutic as those contained in Chronique d'un ete or Carel and Ferd. They

may not, in fact, conform so closely to what Lacan has termed "full speech "-the talk­

ing cure that works through past trauma as an effect of language. The tapes do, however,

tap remarkable, and unpredictable, affective wellsprings in troubled youths, guilt-stricken

fathers, adoring dog-owners, those who have lost or never known love, others whose

capacity for love has been revived. The monologues, which frequently pivot on the con­

fessant's (in)ability to experience physical or emotional intimacy, repeatedly speak the

unspoken. Why, we might ask, do these individuals, many of whom claim to be incapable

of expressing their innermost feelings to those closest to them, choose to eviscerate

themselves so profoundly for the camera?

It is as if, in an age in which the information superhighway breeds a

kind of "knowledge dependency " via antenna, cable, and optical fibers, " The Love

Tapes " effect a temporary inversion of technopolarities. Instead of spewing a one-way

stream of words and images (which, at another level, only soften up the consumer for

the kill), Clarke's installed monitor shows the subject only herself as she (re)produces

herself. The screen-mirror also becomes a blank surface upon which an active projection

of the self rather than a strictly receptive introjection reigns triumphant. At last, in a

reversal of broadcast fortunes close to Brecht's dream, the television stops talking and

just listens.44 Video becomes the eye that sees and the ear that listens, powerfully but

without judgment or reprisal. As for the potential critique of the tapes-that they sim-

9 0

MICHAEL RENOV

( 1

ply commodify emotion or gratify narcissism-the truth is that only a tiny fraction of

these pieces have ever been publicly viewed, and fewer still have been broadcast. The

charge of media celebrity is unconvincing for work whose cumulative impact begins to

feel more and more species specific, less and less individuated.

I remain convinced that it is video-as-potentiality that fuels the emo­

tional impact of the " The Love Tapes. " What makes the experience of the tapes so pow­

erful for subjects and audiences alike can never be duplicated on the couch. Clarke's

success taps into the staggeringly hegemonic media current and temporarily redirects

the flow. The very force that, while informing and entertaining us, delivers us to the

advertisers now becomes a vehicle for performing ourselves for ourselves. The profes­

sional analyst can elicit, mirror, and interpret the subject's desire but lacks the levering

capacity that the media apparatus inchoately mobilizes.

"ONE ON ONE"

The main ob ject that I really want is to see how open I can get to be and I

think this is a unique opportunity for myself because I don't know you, you

don't know me. We don't have to ever know each other besides these tapes.

- KEN from K e n and Louis e

It's possible I could say things to you that I couldn't say to anybody

else . . . . Maybe, we'll see.

- LOUISE from K e n and Louis e

I find that it's that vulnerable place that I have to address. And you have let

me touch yours in a short time. Sometimes people can be married even for

years and years and never have allow . ed their partner to touch that place. And

for that I'm very grateful. I'm very grateful. It was a type of a freedom because

I knew I was like you . ... When you said it, I felt what you were saying.

- KEN from K e n and Louis e

While " The Love Tapes " may be the most streamlined and populist of first-person video

confessions, Wendy Clarke's "One on One " series may be the most complex, bearing as

it does the traces of confessional discourse's triple legacy-the theological, psychoana­

lytic, and criminological. For four years, Clarke was an artist-in-residence at the

California Institution for Men at Chino. During that time she led workshops in poetry

writing, painting, photography, and videomaking. Late in 1990, Clarke proposed a new

project to her video workshop: a series of video letters to be exchanged between the

class members and people on the outside. Like " The Love Tapes, " these video letters

would be intimate and self-regulated but, unlike them, would be addressed, directly and

exclusively, to an individual who would respond in kind.4S

Clarke's concept included another key proviso: the relationship between

91

VIDEO CONFESSIONS

subjects was to remain a video exchange only. " I wanted them to have a very pure video

experience, " Clarke has said. " And I felt that the relationships would be changed if they

met in any other way outside of this video space."46 To that end, Clarke functioned as a

go-between, minimally facilitating the tapings (usually made in solitude, " Love Tapes "

fashion), allowing participants to play back the entry and reshoot if they so chose, then

shuttling the tapes to their proper recipients. And, indeed, the connections made between

these individuals are remarkable, crossing as they do barriers of race, class, gender, age,

and sexual orientation. Those incarcerated are mostly young men of color (black, brown,

and red), while the "outsiders " are typically older, both black and white, and frequently

female. ( Members of the latter group were drawn either from the membership of a progres­

sive church in Santa Monica or from a community of successful African American busi­

nesspeople in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles.) Beyond this sketchy description, few

generalizations can be made that apply equally to all fifteen of the tapes in the series

except to note that the linkages among participants are in every instance effected entirely

through a media apparatus. In this regard, the "One on One " series is a remarkable case

study, one in which, in the words of one critic, "the camera, instead of blocking communi­

cation, seems to be a two-way umbilical cord that nourishes the candor of both parties."47

In an age in which face-to-face encounters have tended to be displaced

by mediated ones (for example, American political campaigns) and in which that devel­

opment is inevitably figured as a loss, "One on One " demonstrates that the contrary can

also be true. " I can express all of my emotions and everything to you, " says Raul, a

twenty-three-year-old Latino, father of two, who struggles with alcoholism and is

estranged from his wife. As the exchange progresses, Raul digs deeper: " To tell the truth,

I'm happy without drinking, real happy without having the bottle and getting drunk, all

of that. Because all of that time, I might have been with a smile but I was crying

inside. " How is it that Raul is capable of revealing himself in this way to the video cam­

era? Is the answer to be found in the particula{ wisdom of his interlocutor, Jeanene, a

Caucasian woman in her late thirties who teaches high school in a Latino section of Los

Angeles? Or can it be that the "One on One " concept engendered a therapeutic experi­

ence for its participants and that, in certain cases, we witness something akin to a posi­

tive transference, as described by Freud, in which the removal of repression is aided by

the formation of an attachment to the analyst, an attachment properly belonging to ear­

lier (often parental) relationships?

If the latter is so (transference mingling with incipient bonds of kinship

or affection), the wonder of the "One on One " tapes is that the transference tends to be

both mutual and reciprocal. In almost every instance, vulnerabilities are shared, posi­

tions of confessor and confessant exchanged. In fact, the psychodynamic is such that the

openness of the one induces greater openness in the other in a kind of therapeutic spiral.

In Ken and Louise, a black man-married, restrained but confident, a talented songwriter

and vocalist-exchanges tapes with an upbeat but somewhat distant white woman of

similar age and interests. He suggests that she is putting on an "air. " She replies that

she is "afraid I'm going to say something wrong to you "; her distance is the result of an

9 2

MICHAEL RENOV

excessive sensitivity to racial politics ingrained from childhood. ( Her father, once a

member of the Communist Party, had been jailed for his political affiliations in the early

1950s.) With each tape exchanged, the emotional intimacy gathers a greater force. Ken

writes and sings a song to Louise about the colors not of the skin but of the heart. He is

a startlingly gifted singer whose lyrics reveal a delicacy and depth of feeling. In reply,

Louise shares with him a small stuffed animal, a monkey named Lucky, whom she cud­

dles and kisses, giggling with nervous excitement. " Every day I hug her and squeeze her

and you're just about the only person who knows about this. " His gift to her has inspired

an even riskier display of her secret self. ( " It's possible I could say things to you that I

couldn't say to anybody else . . . . Maybe, we'll see. ") And it is through the incitation of

the video medium that so powerfully fuses distance and intimacy that this cathartic pas

de deux is effected.

As the exchange progresses and Ken nears his date of release, many of the

viewer's expectations are overturned. Ken is increasingly buoyant of spirit, self-assured,

FIGURE 2 Ken from Wendy Clarke's Ken and Louise (1991)

FIGURE 3 Louise from Wendy Clarke's Ken and Louise ( 1991)

offering more than receiving emotional support. Louise

strips herself bare, revealing layer after layer of emotion

testifying to the loneliness of her life, her inability to find a

man to love. Her mood darkens. Given the audio/visibility

of the process, we are able to judge these interior changes

through outward signs-gesture, facial expression, posture,

and choice of attire, as well as vocal tonalities. Our initial

assumptions about these tapes are likely to include an

implicit belief in the position of the "outsider " as the more

powerful and empowering one (with the attention paid to

the inmates restoring their damaged self-esteem). And

while the assumption may hold initially and even through­

out many of the fifteen "One on One " dialogues, it proves

to be far from universal. By her fifth tape, Louise is slumped

deep into her chair. Her unmade-up face a mask of despair,

she announces that she is in a "state of grief. " In Ken's

reply, he assures her that her "dark, over-clouded look

upon things " will pass. He speaks of wanting to reach out

to her "in a real way, " adding " I don't necessarily mean the

man -lady type of thing. "

Both Ken and Louise struggle to define the

growing connection between them. There is the flicker of

sexual attraction, particularly in Louise's flirtatious begin-

nings. That edge never entirely disappears, evidenced by

Louise's embarrassment well into the tape when she realizes that she has casually

addressed Ken as "hon. " And, indeed, what names do we have for such a hybridized

relationship-intimate yet remote, equal parts human and electronic? The distance is

the result of the bar to bodily contact, nearness the result of an intensity of discourse, a

9 3

VIDEO CONFESSIONS

zeroing in on the other's affective domain. After Louise shares her Lucky with Ken, he

shows her the guitar that he has played in previous tapes. He has christened it " Louise "

in her honor, adding: " It's like a lady-curves and stuff like that. It happens to be brown,

but that's no re flection on you." Exchanged confidences are gifts bestowed, producing

and eliciting confession. As per the psychoanalytic literature, unconscious material is

transferred into verbal presentations and perceptions, repressed material is unleashed,

preparing the way for "the possibility for a better kind of adjustment to reality. "48

But there are more directly political considerations to be encountered

alongside the therapeutic ones. In the context of Brecht's critique of radio (see note 44),

video exchanges such as those of the "One on One " series constitute a kind of resistance

to the commercial broadcast model, which offers a "mere sharing out " of entertainment.

Brecht imagined the potential of radio as "the finest possible communication apparatus

in public life, " as "a vast network of pipes " if only it "knew how to receive as well as to

transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relation­

ship instead of isolating him. "49 If it can be said of the series that transferential relations

between insiders and outsiders are mutual and reciprocal, it can also be said that the

clear-cut distinction between producer and consumer is obviated. While a claim of media

empowerment can be made for other public art projects, such as " The Love Tapes, " in

which thousands of individuals from all walks of life have made tapes by themselves

about themselves, here the gains are even greater. Here, in a precise miming of the

Brechtian prescription, "the listener speak[s] as well as hear[s], " indeed, speaks only after

listening, perhaps speaks even while hearing. This delicacy of listening is in fact

enhanced by the mediated circumstances; there are no auxiliary sources of information

for these interlocutors. The subjects of the video letter exchanges learn to listen with a

special intensity, frequently replaying the tape just received several times before begin­

ning their own reply. Theirs is a very special kind of speech, one that teaches listening.

These exchanges are also profoundly communitarian in their power to

overcome the isolation of those incarcerated. How rarely do contemporary media forms

work to build bridges across human differences rather than simply make spectacles of

those differences? In this instance, the bridges built transcend their apparent limits in

demonstrable ways. People who have never and will never meet enter into relations in

which trust grows incrementally, in which vulnerabilities are increasingly shared, in

which emotions attached to long-buried experiences are allowed to surface. In Ricky

and Cecilia, a young Latino man serving a sixteen-month jail sentence on drug charges

develops a video relationship with Cecilia, a fifty-one-year-old white woman. In his very

first tape, Rickey speaks about the mix of feelings he has for his younger brother who is

also serving time. He is sorry to have failed as a role model, regretful that their relation­

ship has soured. In her next tape, Cecilia replies in kind:

I was very close _to my younger sister and we were very good friends when I

was in my twenties and she was in her teens. Then she became mentally ill

and later, when she was in her twenties-and it was related to the mental ill-

9 4

MICHAEL RENOV

ness-she died. I lost her completely except in my memories and feelings. So

maybe you have a fear that you 'll lose your brother. But maybe you won 't,

maybe there 's still hope for you two and you 'll be able to connect up when

you 're both out of prison.

The young man is clearly moved by this disclosure; he returns to the topic of his

estranged brother several times more during the remainder of their exchanges. Cecilia

has struck a nerve. In "One on One, " relationships of trust are built upon a foundation

of reciprocal confession, freely given and exchanged. Confidences, painful memories, the

willingness to allow the other to touch one's own place of vulnerability and vice versa

become the basis for a connection between people who will never meet except on

videotape.

The "One on One " dialogues are remarkable from another perspective as

well. For if, as I have claimed, the confessions exchanged are freely given, they can be

contrasted to another kind of self-disclosure well known to the incarcerated subjects.

Confession plays an important role in criminology and the practice of law, as evidenced

in such prime-time cop shows as NYPD Blue. Detective John Kelly's most outstanding

police skill is his ability to induce confessions through recourse to an emotional reper­

toire ranging from the quiescence of feigned sympathy to the near edge of violence. If

Kelly can move from tough guy to father confessor so adroitly, it is because, in ushering

the accused into those airless rooms, he shares with them a zone of liminality. In crimi­

nological terms, confession is a threshold moment, marking the possibility of the crimi­

nal's first step on his way back to society. " By confessing, he finds the first possibility of

a return to the community after he had put himself, through his deed, outside its lim­

its. "SD In that liminal zone, no emotion, no promise, no sign of remorse remains

unthinkable. Kelly's weekly performances are staged both for the perpetrators and for an

audience of millions. But there is a particular legacy-visual representation as an appara­

tus of social control-that haunts this spectacle.

Photographically based representation has played a substantial historical

role in the recent history of state power. As John Tagg writes in The Burden of

Representation, photography began to function as a regulatory and disciplinary appara­

tus in the aftermath of the failed rebellions of the late 1 840s, just at the moment of the

consolidation of power of the modern state.s l Tagg traces a rendezvous between a "novel

form of the state and a new and a developing technology of knowledge " in which pho­

tography could contribute to the control of a large and dangerously diversified workforce

newly arrived to the urban centers.

Like the state, the camera is never neutral. The representations it produces are

highly coded, and the power it wields is never its own. As a means of record,

it arrives on the scene vested with a particular authority to arrest, picture and

transform daily life, a power to see and record .... If, in the last decades of the

nineteenth century, the squalid slum displaces the country seat and the

9 5

VIDEO CONFESSIONS

"a bnormal " phys iognom ies of pat ient and pr isoner d isplace the ped igreed fea­

tures of the ar istocracy, then the ir presence in representat ion is no longer a

mar k of cele brat ion but a burden of su bject ion. A vast and repet it ive arch ive

of images is accumulated in wh ich the smallest dev iat ions may be noted, clas­

s ified and filed. The format var ies hardly at all. There are bod ies and spaces.

The bod ies -wor kers, vagrants, cr im inals, pat ients, the insane, the poor, the

colon ized races -are ta ken one by one: isolated in a shallow, conta ined space;

turned full face and su bjected to an unreturna ble ga ze; illum inated, focused,

measured, num bered and named; forced to y ield to the m inutest scrut iny of

gestures and features . Each dev ice is the trace of a wordless power, repl icated

in countless images, whenever the photographer prepares an exposure, in

pol ice cell, pr ison, m iss ion house, hosp ital, asylum, or school. 52

L ike the confess ion, the mug shot plays a recurrent role in NYPD Blue. Eyew itnesses

whose test imony w ill be needed to conv ict are frequently g iven pages of images-head

shots that have been illum inated, focused, measured, num bered, and named-from

wh ich they are asked to choose and thus prov ide the cruc ial i.d. In "One on One, " the

incarcerated, wh ile also " isolated in a shallow, conta ined space; turned full face, " are

not su bjected to an unreturna ble gaze. These pr isoners, after all, have already been 11 su b­

jected " in countless ways: removed from soc ial contact and from the ir fam il ies and

g iven cloth ing, l iv ing space, and food meant to re inforce a reg imen of m ind-num bing

un iform ity. Indeed, th e exper ience of incarcerat ion is calculated to str ip the inmate of

all the trapp ings of ind iv iduat ion through wh ich su bjecthood is ach ieved. But, in se iz ing

the opportun ity to return the med ia gaze, to speak as well as l isten, these men are

endowed w ith a measure of su bject iv ity den ied the most pr iv ileged TV v iewer tuned to

the broadcast s ignal.

The "One on One " pro ject attests to a power latent in the v ideo med i­

um, a power that has seldom been explored. It is a power that is pol it ical, psycholog ical,

and sp ir itual: a power to fac il itate the reversal of repress ion at the level of (confess ional)

speech and of exper ience and in so do ing forge bonds that are wholly med ia spec ific.

Contrary to expectat ion, these med ia-spec ific relat ionsh ips appear to engender effects

(the v is ible s igns of bolstered sp ir its, as well as aud ible test imony) that are bid irect ional,

exper ienced by both v ideo partners. It is my content ion that th is new k ind of relat ion­

sh ip is a fundamentally therapeut ic one rooted in confess ion, freely and mutually

exchanged. In "One on One, " the inmates' confess ions-the uncoerced express ions of

unspoken pa in or pleasure -elude author ity rather than wholly su bm it to it, as Foucault

would have it. These unsanct ioned utterances serve no inst itut ional master. s3 Wh ile

indeed judgment, consolat ion, even reconc il iat ion may be sought from the interlocutor

11 outs ide, " the dynam ic of dom inance and su bm iss ion is everywhere revers ible. If the ear

of the other indeed contr ibutes to the (re)construct ion of the speak ing self, it is only on

cond it ion that the pos it ions of self and other, confessor and confessant, rema in flu id and

rec iprocal.

9 6

MICHAEL RENOV

CONCL USION

As I stated nea r the beginning of this essay, I have litt le inte rest in the onto logi ca l pu ri­

ty of my claims fo r video confessions. I have, fo llowing Fou cau lt, been inte rested in

t ra cing a ske leta l histo ry of confession and of the fo rces of rep ression that have p rodu ced

in the Weste rn subje ct a "regu lated and po lymo rphous in citement to dis cou rse. " I have

claimed that a new and pa rti cu la r va riant of ritua lized se lf-examination has a risen ove r

the past two de cades in the fo rm of the fi rst-pe rson video confession, with video unde r­

stood as a fo rmat uni que ly suited to that pu rpose owing to its potentia l fo r p rivatized

p rodu ction and consumption. Whi le pointing to a conside rab le body of re cent wo rk

made by video a rtists that I have cha ra cte rized as confessiona l, I have given spe cia l

attention to two p roje cts unde rtaken by Wendy C la rke, "The Love Tapes " and "One on

One . " In the tapes of these se ries, peop le of dispa rate ba ckg round and life expe rien ce a re

given the oppo rtunity to revea l hidden pa rts of themse lves th rough di re ct add ress to a

came ra that they cont ro l. Video, as appa ratus and potentia lity, be comes in these wo rks a

fa ci litato r to se lf-examination.

But this is confessiona l dis cou rse p rodu ced neithe r fo r p rofit no r fo r

tempo ra ry ce leb rity in the manne r of comme rcia l ta lk fo rmats on radio o r T V . Rathe r I

have a rgued, most pointed ly in refe ren ce to the "One on One " tapes, that video confes­

sions p rodu ced and ex changed in nonhegemoni c contexts can be powe rfu l too ls fo r se lf­

unde rstanding, as we ll as fo r two-way communi cation, fo r the fo rging of human bonds,

and fo r emotiona l re cove ry. In cont rast to the lega cy of photog raphi c rep resentation as a

regu lato ry and dis cip lina ry appa ratus, fi rst-pe rson video confessions of this so rt affo rd

a g limpse of a mo re utopian t raje cto ry in whi ch cu ltu ra l p rodu ction and consumption

ming le and inte ra ct, and in whi ch the media fa ci litate unde rstanding a cross the gaps of

human diffe ren ce, rathe r than simp ly capita lize on those diffe ren ces in a rush to spe cta cle.

N 0 l t �

-H- I Cited in Jeremy Tambling, Confession: Sexuality, Sin,

the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 1 990), 37. Canon 21 , "Omnis utriusque sexus,"

mandated annua l confession for the faithful, to be

fulfi l led before the Easter communion. The place of

private confession within church doctrine was the

subject of much debate and revision throughout the

medieval period.

2 Theodor Reik, The Compulsion to Confess: On the

Psychoanalysis of Crime and Punishment (New York:

Farra r, Straus, and Cudahy, 1 945), 302. The book is

composed of a series of lectures del ivered at the

Teaching I nstitute of the Vienna Psychoanalytic

Association in 1 924; its exha ustive treatment of the

subject received the endorsement of Freud h imself.

( I n a letter to Reik, Freud termed the treatise

"thoughtful and extremely important.") In Reik's

analysis of it, confession emerges as a functional ly

complex psychoanalytic term. The incl ination to

confess is "a modified urge for the expression of the

drives" that "are felt or recognized as forbidden"

( 194-95). Confession produces a "partia l gratification"

of the repressed thought or a ct, a kind of emotional

relief. While Reik posits a masochistic component to

confession (a "need for punishment"), he c laims for it

another seemingly contradictory function, "the

unconscious urge to ach ieve the loss of love" (208).

Reik goes on to analyze the compulsion to confess in

9 7

VIDEO CONFESSIONS

its several manifestations: in the fields of criminology

and criminal law, rel igion, myth, a rt and language,

child psychology, and pedagogy.

3 Michel Foucault, "The Confession of the Flesh," in

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other

Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books,

1 980), 210.

4 I bid., 21 1 , 21 5-1 6.

s Jeremy Tambling makes the case for a distinction

between autobiogra phy, which he takes to be a "self­

fashioning," and confession, which, of necessity,

submits itself to the judgment of a higher authority.

Despite these differences, however, "the intertwining

of the two forms seems important, ultimately, rather

than the possibi l ity of attempting to see them as

opposites" (Tambling, Confession, 9).

6 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1,

An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:

Vintage Books, 1 978), 61 -62.

7 Peter Dennis Bathory, Political Theory as Public

Confession: The Social and Political Thought of St.

Augustine of Hippo (New Brunswick, N.J. :

Tra nsaction Books, 1 98 1 ), 21 .

8 Sigmund Freud, "Transference," in A General

Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere

(New York: Washington Square Press, 1 966), 448.

Freud notes that the transference can be either

affectionate or hostile, can evince faith in the treat­

ment or deep-seated resista nce. This is because the

ana lyst becomes an object invested with l ibido, a

process that stands as an absolute requirement for

successful treatment.

9 "Even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless

anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the

flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that

Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that

God is the truth, that truth is divine.-But what if this

should become more and more incredible, if noth ing

should prove to be divine any more unless it were

error, blindness, the lie-if God himself should prove

to be our most enduring l ie?" (Friedrich Nietzsche,

The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman [New York:

Vintage Books, 1 974], 283). Lacanian subject con­

struction positions the Other as the source of desire

and of meaning. "What I seek in speech is the

response of the other. What constitutes me as subject

is my question. In order to be recognized by the other,

I utter what was only in view of what will be. In order

to find him, I call him by a name that he must assume

9 8

MICHAEL RE NOV

or refuse in order to reply to me" (Jacques La c an,

Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York:

Norton, 1 977], 86). In La canian terms, confessional

discourse is a lways addressed to the Other; it is the

desiring letter that always arrives at its destination.

10 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 59.

I I Any ana lysis that constructs the subject's dependen­

cy on an external, a l l-knowing source as separable

from the thera peutic effects that a ccrue from confes­

sion clearly misrecognizes the functiona l dynamic of

the confessional a ct. A sense of unburdening can

only occur i f one endows the auditor with the power

to g rant a bsolution.

I 2 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1 967), 1 8 1 .

I3 Reik, Compulsion to Confess, 250. Phil ip Woollcett,

writing in the Journal for the Scientific Study of

Religion, concurred with Reik's assessment:

"Augustine was the greatest psychologist of his time

and probably for many centuries to come" (c ited in

Bathory, Political Theory, 55).

I 4 Reik, Compulsion to Confess, 1 92.

I s Bathory cla ims that Augustine developed "a mode of

instruction through publ ic confession" ( 1 7). He exam­

ines Au gustine's "therapeutic method," in particular

his use of anxiety as a positive rather than negative

force. "Anxiety was a necessary part of people's lives,

and he offers them the means to face it. In the proc­

ess, anxiety took on a creative potentia l in that it

could-if properly perceived-chal lenge people and

lead not to para lysis but to an active search for self­

rea lization" (38).

I 6 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 34.

I 7 William J ames, The Varieties of Religious Experience:

A Study in Human Nature (New York: Coll ier Books,

1 961 ), 360.

I 8 Norberta Va lentini and C lara di Meglio, Sex and the

Confessional, trans. Melton S. Davis (New York: Stein

and Day, 1 974), 1 2, 21 1 .

I 9 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature ( Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1 977), 1 21-27.

2o Mimi White, Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in

American Television (Chapel Hil l , N .C.: Un iversity of

North Carolina Press, 1 992), 8 1 , 1 78.

2 I I bid., 1 9.

22 "The a ctua l commodity, then, is the ultimate referent

of the television discourse" (Nick Browne, "The

Politica l Economy of the Television (Super)Text,"

Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9, no. 3 [Summer

1 984]: 1 8 1 ).

23 "The compulsive factor eventua lly found its repre­

sentation and objectification in the obligation to

confess," says Reik in The Compulsion to Confess

(300). Mandatory monthly confession after the Council

of Trent finds its therapeutic counterpart in the obliga­

tory schedul ing of ana lytic sessions.

24 White, Tele-Advising, 1 79. The confessional d isplay

can a lso become the basis for the viewer's own

repetition compulsion, as a number of television

audience studies have shown.

2s I bid., 1 82.

26 Quoted in G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations:

Fifteen Interviews with Film-makers (Garden City, N.Y.:

Doubleday, 1 971 ), 1 37.

27 Michael Renov, "The Distrust of the Visible:

Documentary's Psychoanalytic Encounter," pa per

presented at "Visible Evidence: Strategies and

Pra ctices in Documentary Fi lm and Video," D uke

University, September 1 993. Technoanalysis refers to

the displacement of the ana lyst by the a pparatus

itself, resulting in a kind of do-it-yourself psychothera­

py. The technology becomes both a site of and a relay

point for transference.

28 Jean Rouch, q uoted in Mick Eaton, "The Production

of Cinematic Reality," in Anthropology-Reality­

Cinema: The Films of Jean Rouch, ed. Mick Eaton

(London: BFI, 1 979), 51 .

29 S poken by M ekas as narration over images in Lost,

Lost, Lost. For further discussion of this remarka ble

fi lm, see my "Lost, Lost, Lost Mekas as Essayist," in

To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York

Underground, ed. David E. James (Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1 992), 21 5-39.

30 D avid E. James has written with great insight on the

a lternative cinemas that emerged in the United States

during the 1 960s in opposition to the hegemonic or

industrial c inema. At issue is a notion of the "mode of

cu ltural production" inspired by M ax Horkheimer and

Theodor Adorno but considerably qua lified by, among

other factors, the many "renegade uses" at the point

of consumption (David E. J ames, Allegories of

Cinema: American Film in the Sixties [Princeton, N.J. :

Princeton University Press, 1 989], 3-28).

3 1 Perha ps, rather than pointing to the l imits of electron­

ic "handcrafting," it would be more accurate to

suggest that the artisanal potential for video culture is

simply unlike the cinema's, which is organized around

tacti l ity (the "feel" of celluloid). The first and leg­

endary video art events of the early 1960s, Nam June

Paik's and Wolf Vostell's, were insta llations in which

the televisual hardware was stripped of its techno­

use va lue, then reworked "by hand" to suit the artist's

vision. Banks of TV sets became the plastic medium. Video art thus began as a kind of artisanal reflex to

the very technology that rendered it possible.

32 Long after I had begun to research this essay, which I

planned to cal l "The Electronic Confessional," I

chanced upon a book of the same name authored by

a husband and wife team of writers specia lizing in

sexology (Howard R. and Martha E. Lewis, The

Electronic Confessional: A Sex Book of the 80's [New York: Evans, 1 986] ). The Lewises had, it seems, devel­

oped a computer service ca l led Human Sexuality

(HSX for short), a "videotex" service offering "discus­

sion, information and advice on a wide variety of

issues related to sex." The book offers an introduc­

tion to the system and its uses for the uninitiated

while devoting itself primarily to the reprod uction of a

selection of HSX queries, entries, and exchanges.

One example may serve to i l lustrate the tone of the

book: a married man confesses to a predilection for

masturbating while wearing diapers into which he

has previously urinated. "My wife and I have 'normal'

sex, but I need more sexual release than she does. So

I turn to the dia per"(88). Through the services of HSX,

the man is informed of a group ca lled the Diaper Pai l

Fraternity out of Sausa lito, Cal ifornia (with a member­

ship of fifteen hundred), with whom he may presum­

a bly choose to find fellowship. The book certainly

suggested whole new frontiers of confessional d is­

course for the 1 990s. It a lso convinced me to find

anoth er title for this cha pter.

33 "The emphasis here is on the repl ication of the histor­

ical real, the creation of a second-order rea lity cut to

the measure of our desire-to cheat death, stop time,

restore loss" (Michael Renov, "Toward a Poetics of

Documentary," in Theorizing Documentary, ed.

Michael Renov [New York: Routledge, 1 993], 25).

34 Indeed the wedding video must delegate the first­

person function to the roving or multiple eye of the

professional . For a thorough treatment of th is video

phenomenon, see James Moran's chapter 23 essay, in

this book.

9 9

VIDEO CONFESS I ONS

35 Of course, a l l confession is spoken in the "first per­

son ." The distinction I wish to make is between

confession that is produced through the intervention

of another party who controls enunciation and that

discourse that is self-activated, subject only to one's

own editorial agency.

36 The interactive mode is the useful term adopted by

Bi l l Nichols to describe the third of four documentary

modes of representation in his Representing Reality

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 991 ), 32-75.

In comparison with the expository mode, in which

arguments are rhetorical ly developed, frequently via

voice-over narration, or the observational mode,

which opts for the noninterventionism of American

direct cinema, fi lms of the interactive type "stress

images of testimony or verbal exchange and images

of demonstration . . . . Textual authority sh ifts toward

the social actors recruited . . . . The shift of emphasis

[is] from an author-centered voice of authority to a

witness-centered voice of testimony" (44, 48).

37 Reik, Compulsion to Confess, 210-1 1 .

38 Over a period of many months i n the early 1970s,

Carel and Ferd remained a staple feature at the Video

Free America exh ibition site in the warehouse district

of San Francisco. Local audiences were able to

develop a long-term relationship with the unfolding

melodrama in the manner of mainstream soaps.

39 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 61 -62.

40 Hershman's statement is del iciously paradoxical,

since she knows her discourse to be a public one,

a lbeit an excruc iatingly private public discourse.

4 1 Here I refer to Reik's analysis of the confessiona l

impulse in which he notes that confession "grants a

partia l gratification to the repressed wishes and

impulses" whi le a lso fulfi l l ing the need for punish­

ment. "Actual ly, we often see symptoms disappear in

ana lysis when needs of th is kind, at odds with each

other, have found a completely adequate expression

in confession" (204).

42 Is it only coincidenta l that the edifice in which "Love

Tapes" are made is architecturally congruent with the

increasingly obsolescent church confessional? The

design of each, suited to the containment of a single

confessing body, nevertheless provides windowed

access to another space that underwrites and autho­

rizes it.

43 I borrow the notion of the mana-word from Roland

Barthes: " In an author's lexicon, will there not a lways

1 0 0

M I CHAEL RENOV

be a word-as-mana, a word whose ardent, com plex,

ineffa ble, and somehow sacred signification gives the

i l lusion that by th is word one might answer for every­

thing? Such a word is neith er eccentric nor centra l; it

is motionless a nd carried, floating, never pigeonholed,

always atopic (escaping any topic), at once remain­

der and supplement, a signifier taking up the place of

every signified." For Barthes, that word is body

(Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes,

trans. Richard Howard [New York: Hi l l and Wa ng,

1 977], 1 29).

44 In "The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication,"

written in 1932, Bertolt Brecht critiqued radio for the

singularity of its purpose: as a profit-motivated vehi­

cle for delivering enterta inment rather than as a

medium of two-way exchange. "But qu ite apart from

the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided

when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for

distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive

suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribu­

tion to communication . . . . The sl ightest advance in

this direction is bound to suc ceed far more spectacu­

larly tha n a ny performance of a cul inary k ind. As for

the te chnique that needs to be developed for all such

operations, it must follow the pr ime objective of

turning the a udience not only into pupils but into

tea chers" (Bertolt Brecht, "The Radio as an

Apparatus of Communication," in Video Culture, ed .

John Hanhardt [Rochester, N.Y.: Visua l Studies

Workshop Press, 1 986], 53-54).

45 Questions of various sorts arise when the tapes of the

"One on One" series are exhibited or broadcast. Is

there a pact of sorts between the two interlocutors,

which the introduction of an audience externa l to the

exchange necessari ly breac hes? On ly recently, three

years after the project's completion, as the tapes

have begun to be shown in c lassrooms, at publ ic

screenings, and soon on the Los Angeles PBS affi liate,

KCET, has publ ic exhibition become an issue. In my

own experience of ta lking about this work a nd screen­

ing it in c lasses and publ ic venues, I h ave found that

audiences tend to be uneasy with their perceived

positioning as voyeurs of exchanged confidences. The

fa ct that the-very concept of the "One on One" series

was conceived in col laboration with the video work­

shop partic ipants, all of whom signed releases a utho­

rizing future screenings of the work, seems not to

dispel the uneasiness. This response is l ikely con­

nected to a historica l tendency in the West in which

publ ic forms of confession have been displaced by

forms of self-disclosure that are private and protected

(such as the "privi leged communications" between

ourselves and our doctors, lawyers, and priests). The

publ ic display of exchanged confessions-when

received as "real" rather than fictional and predicated

on a one-to-one, reciprocal exchange-strikes some

audiences as a violation of principle. It seems to me,

however, that the project's fundamental value has

a lways been as a kind of heuristic device, a model for

interpersonal communication in a media age. From

one point of view, the particulars of any confession

are less meaningful than the potentia l ity of the project

as a whole for the creation of human dialogue across

a whole series of spatial and cultural d isjunctures.

46 Wendy Clarke, cited in Howard Rosenberg, '"One on

One' Is the Best TV Talk You Can't See," Los Angeles Times, 8 December 1 993, F8.

47 I bid .

48 Reik, Compulsion to Confess, 205.

49 Brecht, "Radio," 53.

5o Reik, Compulsion to Confess, 79.

51 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation (Amherst:

University of Massachusetts Press, 1 988), 60-61 .

52 Ib id., 63-64.

53 In fact, while the "One on One" tapes were made in

conjunction with Cla rke's video workshop at Chino

and were thus institutional ly "legitimate," prison

officials had no idea about the particulars of the

project. Proposals for future projects of this sort

would, in Clarke's opinion, face little chance of accep­

tance. Personal communication with Wendy Clarke,

19 January 1 994.

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VIDEO CONFESSIONS