Chapter 9
Oral Histories: the biographical background of the
collective (1999)
Oral history as a
methodology is introduced in some detail. This is followed by a discussion of
the six interviews with collective members made in the autumn of 1999. This discussion
is in three parts and covers matters of ethnic identity; educational and class
backgrounds; and cultural influences. Relations between these life experiences
and the broader historical provenances of the group are noted.
I
was only seven when she (my great-grandmother) died and most of her stories
came to me through other family members. They taught me when I came to consider
them much later, to treat so called 'oral history' with care. As stories and
anecdotes they were lively and interesting, as were the stories passed on by
other branches of the family - stories of seafaring under sail and of the
theatre and music hall. But as factual or descriptive accounts they lost and
gained much in the telling. (Dorothy Thompson, 1993 p5)
Is this what is meant by
oral history? If a person takes note of the stories told by their grandmother
are they an Oral Historian? Dorothy Thompson's great grandmother's stories were
told to her by other family members. They were not direct memories of
experiences but memories of the stories related by the grandmother. To
construct an oral history in the academic sense of the word it is preferable to
record a person talking about the past that they themselves experienced. What
Dorothy Thompson is talking about is the story of the past that is passed down
to us through oral culture. A clear distinction needs to be maintained between
the two meanings of oral history. Clearly someone talking about their own
experience has a certain immediacy and veracity that a secondary account does
not.
Someone relating
their memory of what someone else said is clearly a lot less reliable than a
direct memory of what they themselves experienced. With memories of secondhand
stories we enter an area of hear-say and eventually myth - which is in itself
interesting but which we can usefully differentiate from accounts of actual
experiences. Even directly related memories of things experienced constitute
evidence that should not be asserted as historical fact without a rigorous
checking against other sources.[1]
Oral cultures
may be defined as being all those cultures in which the written form does not
play a central role. The performative is central in oral cultures. The word is
not just spoken but accompanied by a veritable flux of expressive forms. Oral
communication occurs in forms which include tonal variation, volume modulation,
velocity and rhythm as well as gesture, posture and facial expression - it is a
multi-sensory performance medium. This is in addition to the musical characteristics
which are unique to spoken language like jingling combinations and regional
rhythms. As the Booker Prize winning Glasg'wegian novelist James Kelman has
shown, people from oral cultures may communicate with few words but will have a
rich non-verbal communication.[2]
I have already
made the point that Exploding Cinema is embedded in an oral culture. It is
therefore important to understand oral culture if we are to fully appreciate
the communicative dynamics of phenomena such as Exploding Cinema.[3]
For the purposes
of this methodology we should note that whilst written and printed documents,
such as the programmes, may be more accurate at fixing events in a precise
chronology, oral accounts might tell us more about the dynamics and force of
experience that actually motivates and gives qualitative content to social
history. Both sources of data have their uses in making sense of the past and
there is no reason why these uses cannot be complimentary.
Quite apart from
the formal differences whole areas of human life have gone unrecorded in
written documents and are accessible only through the verbal reports of
witnesses. This information can be quite utilitarian; such as how an obsolete
tool was made and used. Or it can be more subjective information such as
persons experience of a war. This subjective information may not be simple to
transcribe as much of its value may be contained in the non-verbal aspect of
oral communication, as described above, rather than in words alone.
The oral history
interview differs from the journalistic interview in that it should not be
contained by the agenda of the interviewer. Ideally it is the interviewee that
decides on the priorities of what is to be recounted. Oral history is ideally
interviewee led.[4]
The
History of Oral History
How and why oral history
came to differentiate itself as a distinct area of study from mainstream
history is important in understanding oral history as a distinct methodology.
After WWII the
expansion of higher education meant that thousands of lower-class people
entered tertiary education of the first time and began to notice the absence of
their own ancestors from the history books. The hegemonic controls of the
literary elite were also being challenged by the insistent demands of the new mass
communications markets. Historians such as G.D.H.Cole and H.L.Beales, radicals
from the Thirties, founded the Society for the Study of Labour History and for
the first time the history of the common people began to be studied in earnest
and without condescension by historians such as Edward and Dorothy Thompson.
By the mid-Sixties a new
lower-class intelligentsia had started to ask radical questions about the lack
of primary sources from which a more democratic history could be constructed.
Quoting Dorothy Thompson again;
The
wealthy and educated insiders had left many records. Not only in the mass of
material concerned with government and high politics, but in the literature, in
the records of legal cases, property transactions, in personal journals and correspondence,
and in every kind of document from wills to laundry lists. The poor had no
muniment rooms and seldom entered any records on their own terms. They appear
as servants, criminals, recipients of charity or as turbulent or obedient
subjects. (Dorothy Thompson, 1993 p16)
It was in the heady
atmosphere of Sixties cultural revolt that Oral History arose to fill this
void. It was Paul Thompson from one of the new universities that made the first
large scale oral history programme in Britain in which 459 Edwardians born
between 1872 and 1906 were interviewed about family and work.[5]
[published in 1975 as The Edwardians.. check and list]
This work was
aided by a technological advanceÉ the portable cassette tape recorder. The
first oral history tape recording had been made in the 1930s as part of the US
New Deal Federal Writers Project but cumbersome early equipment limited its
use. The advent of simple cheap
hi-fidelity sound recording allowed the oral to be archived as evidence so the
most compelling argument against the use of oral sources in the construction of
history began to evaporate.
Oral History, as
a sort of movement, symbolised a democratic repositioning of the viewpoints
from which representations of ourselves were being made. Our consciousness of
who we are as humans is made from and contained within these shared
representations.
Since then oral
testimony has informed many history programmes on television and had a huge
influence on documentaries.[6]
There are now several major archives in London: The Imperial War Museum, The
National Sound Archive, the BBC Sound Archive and The Museum of London are
amongst the largest.
Methodological
Considerations.
Many witnesses may suppress
traumatic memories. The full emotional force of a person's experience is not
usually available outside of the special conditions of regular therapeutic
counseling. This is a limitation of my interviews. In spite of this some very
personal and emotionally charged information is revealed. Again it should be
emphasised that the reductive nature of transcription does tend to mute the
emotional charge of oral statements.[7]
Apart from the
suppression of trauma, another problem with oral testimony is related to the
vagaries of more distant memories. For instance, it is very common for people
to telescope two similar events into one. Even the two world wars have been
mixed up by people who lived through both of them. This was true of the
Exploding history when I was asking about the early continental tours. I was
not able to get a coherent account of the second tour to Germany.[8]
The more dramatic, recent and repeated an experience, the more likely it is to
be remembered clearly. Even relatively recent events are not available without
the right triggers. Asking the right question can gain access to a flood of
vivid memories which in another context might not be accessible.[9]
Even written
documents are dependent on the vagaries of memory and as Alessandro Portelli
points out; "What is written is first experienced or seen, and is subject to
distortions even before it is set down on paper." (History Workshop
Journal 12 1981)
The process of oral history can be a medium of
social and personal change in itself. Even something as simple as asking
someone to tell you their life story can allow them the space to re-appraise
their lives, sometimes in profound ways. Being part of the rituals of a more
formal history making process can validate the worth of a person's life -
perhaps at a time when little else does. Oral history in old peoples' homes has
been noticed to have a profoundly therapeutic effect. This has led to a
cross-over in practice with clinical psychology which is now an area of
practice often known as Reminiscence work. As the population of elderly people
grows the value of these processes may become increasingly important.
But the
recording process can also lead to unexpected closure. Recording an account of
an experience can give it a sense of completion. This is even more likely if
the record is published. A published validation of the efforts of the Exploding
Cinema Collective might make it seem less urgent to keep asserting the live
event. It could give a sense that it was time to move on.
As I have said
the limitation of research into the past using Oral History is the life-span of
the population under study. Now that tape archives, such as the excellent
resources offered by the Imperial War Museum, are established, it will be
increasingly possible at least to listen to people who died some time ago. It
must be admitted that cassette tapes are a tedious form of primary source being
impossible to flick through in the way you can a book. This constitutes a real
limitation to their use compared with records on paper. The advanced search
facilities of digital recordings will go some way to dissolving this barrier
and promise to make oral sources an important component of future knowledges.
Oral History
offers the possibility of a more diverse or consensual history whose emphasis
is not so much the hard - cold - dry - facts but more the soft, warm, moist
aspects of human experience. The existence of a diverse, non-linear digital
archives based on a democratic process of recording oral testimony is something
that would make the historicising of social relations on a wide scale more
feasible. My aim with the current interviews is less ambitious. It is simply to
see what influences in peoples lives led them to join Exploding Cinema and once
there how these earlier experiences might have contributed to the cultural
activity.
The interviews
with the Exploding Cinema collective were recorded on DVCAM[10]
video in people's homes from August to December 1999.[11]
The forty minute interviews were divided into two halves. For the first twenty
minutes I asked people to tell their life story with some emphasis on their
first experiences of film and art. There was then the possibility of a short
break followed by a twenty minute interview which asked for their most
memorable experiences of Exploding Shows and whatever else they wanted to say
about their time with Exploding Cinema.
I had made an
earlier Hi8 video recording of Duncan Reekie talking about the early history of
the Exploding Cinema and his own life in 1996.[12]
So I started the new interview by asking him further information about one
aspect of his family history which had a direct link with musichall. The rest
of the interview was a discussion of theoretical issues with regard to the
historicisation of Exploding Cinema.
The audio was
then transferred to standard audio cassette tape and professionally transcribed.
The transcriptions were checked against the tapes. VHS viewing copies and
electronic files of the transcription were sent to each of the interviewees.[13]
Print-outs of
the transcriptions were then used to construct an edited script that foregrounds
what key aspects of the life histories of these collective members. I edited
the transcripts under three headings: Where they are from; What their early
influences were; How they came to join Exploding Cinema. I wanted to show how
people's backgrounds have an influence on present cultural formations. Or to
put it another way how present formations arise in part from the subjective
experiences of actors and those of their ancestors. A draft of this script was
also circulated to the collective. Other material recorded in these interviews
that covers more recent experiences of Exploding Cinema is used throughout the
narrative history section of this thesis.
It would no doubt
be better to view this material on video than read the edited transcript.
The sound and image on video inevitably gives a richer and more vivid representation
compared to the transcripts and allows us to grasp the performative quality
of oral communication.
[14]
[1] Even testimony, which must be regarded as factually
doubtful, such as stories of second-hand experiences, may be of use in
reflecting on people's values and interests. Giving information, not on fact,
but on myth which can itself be analysed as an expression of a peoples values.
[3] Understandably, and as I have noted in the previous
chapters (on Culture and semiotic analysis), oral culture and its communicative
media have been relatively unstudied compared with the study of the literary
sphere.
[4] Of course when it comes to selecting from the recorded
interviews and making an analysis and interpretation the historian still has
tremendous power to form the resulting history.
[5] One of the best sources on the history of oral history
is Paul Thompson's The Voice of the Past: Oral history, (Oxford U.P. 2nd edition, 1988 orig. 1978)
[6] Stephen Peet produced and directed 'Yesterdays
Witness' the worlds first oral history TV series from 1969 to 1980. 'We made
over 80 programmes for this series' Stephen Peet (CV/self information flyer,
1999).
[8] According to a small poster the second Tour of Germany
was around the beginning of December 1994.
[10] They were recorded on forty minute long DVCAM
videotapes with a SONY PD100p camera equipped with a Sennheiser ME66
microphone.
[11] Interviews were made with Thomas Zagrosek, Colette
Rouhier, Paul Tarrago, Jenet Thomas and Duncan Reekie in their own homes.
Caroline Kennedy was interviewed during an event at the Anarchist Bookfair in
October.
[12] This was made as part of my MA thesis at KIAD (1996)
and was one of my first personal contacts with the group.
[13] The interviewees were thanked and invited to make
further contributions if they wished to amend or add to what they had said on
tape. There were no amendments. Some however did not find it easy to watch
themselves on tape.
[14] Alessandro Portelli has argued (1981) that studying
transcripts is like studying paintings from the reproductions in colour
supplements. The spoken word has so many inflections, especially when
considered as performative communication, that much of the communicative
content is lost in the process of transcription. But even so quotes from
transcriptions can infuse an otherwise dry academic account with an emotional
charge which can radically change an interpretation of content.