Vernacular Video

 It is a small but growing part of the televisual landscape, showing up on everything from public-access cable to Nightline. Its practitioners range from teen-age chroniclers to video artists to veteran reporters. And as it grows, it gives rise to tough questions about applying accepted journalistic standards to innately subjective reporting.

 The subject is personal journalism by camcorder. It is still a marginal player in television, known to most of the public only through the silliness of America's Funniest Home Videos or the sensationalism of shows like I Witness Video or the choreographed realism of Cops and its ilk. But indeed so-called small-format video is growing, and its potential is vast. That is partly because camcorders themselves are spreading like locusts; more than a fifth of American households have them and more than three million are sold each year, according to the Electronic Industries Association.

 Will the camcorder become a widely used tool for ordinary people to tell not-so-ordinary stories to a broad audience, showing us American realities we might not otherwise have been allowed to visit? Will the genre largely circumvent the traditional middlemen of journalism, letting people tell their own stories their own way? Consider these recent documentaries, all produced through public television outlets. Each is told from the grass roots with the help of camcorders:

 Six teen-agers from different ethnic backgrounds pile into a van, recording their encounters with dope, death, and other young people in cities from places like Dayton, Ohio, to Albuquerque, New Mexico (The Ride).

 A brain-damaged man in Minneapolis encounters disability-rights activists -- and discovers a more positive self-image -- on camera (When Billy Broke His Head . . . and Other Tales of Wonder).

 A young Vietnamese immigrant finds America's mean streets and even meaner prisons (Bui Doi Life Like Dust).

 In each case, the subject is encountered up close and personal, at the same time evoking social experience that is rarely seen on commercial television.

 In The Ride, for instance, when a vivacious African-American teen-ager named Paula Patton decides to interview white high school students near the Pine Ridge, South Dakota, reservation about white-Indian tensions, her choice of subject -- race -- is both topical and personal. It becomes even more so when, in Dayton, she stoically endures a drunk's racist ranting as the production team walks down a street at night. In When Billy Broke His Head, Billy Golfus, brain-damaged since a motor-scooter accident, records a meeting with a Medicaid bureaucrat that frustrates them both -- the bureaucrat is patient, decent, and unhelpful -- and makes real Billy's description of the petty humiliations of a disabled day.

 Small-format video will be the staple of a new TV series in development called E.C.U., for "extreme close up." E.C.U., which producer Ellen Schneider will soon start pitching to potential distributors, wants to be the first TV series to showcase first-person stories of unsung America. The idea derived from her work on the public TV series P.O.V. -- Point of View -- which is dedicated to social-issue documentaries. It was on P.O.V. in 1993 that Silverlake Life became a surprise hit.

The film was begun by Tom Joslin, a filmmaker and film teacher, with the help of his lover Mark Massi. It recounts their last days; both died of AIDS. (The project was finished by their former student and friend, Peter Friedman.) The camera goes with Tom to, for instance, the drugstore, where he discovers he no longer has the strength to pull a plastic bucket out of the stacked pile. It travels back to earlier home movies to define his relationship to his parents. It follows Tom through his dying moments, until Mark closes Tom's eyes.

The film won rave reviews, prompted hundreds of letters from viewers, and led P.O.V. to solicit home-videotaped comments that became a regular "Talk Back" feature on P.O.V. episodes.

"What Silverlake Life did," Schneider recalls, "was to put AIDS in the context of a whole human life. So it made connections beyond the AIDS community. We got letters from relatives of cancer patients who connected with it, and from youngsters who said, 'I didn't know homosexuals love each other.' For many people, the whole question of AIDS changed forever."

And now, Schneider thinks, TV journalism might be changed forever. To assess the grass-roots appetite for making personal, point-of-view video, E.C.U. announced in film and video circles that it would hold a series of workshops around the country, where aspiring personal journalists could brainstorm the emerging form. Hundreds of people applied to attend the workshops, which were free, and sixty-six were accepted. Some, like Judith Helfand, were eager to tell intensely intimate yet socially revealing stories to a broadcast audience. Helfand, an independent film producer, discovered when she was twenty-five that she had DES-related cancer. (Her mother when pregnant had taken DES, a drug that has been conclusively linked to cancer in the daughters of women who took it.) Over the last five years since her diagnosis, she has filmed her family's process of adjustment.

 At one point in the mass of tape she has accumulated, her mother breaks down and runs away from the camera, sobbing, "Why does everyone have to see our pain?" But even this was taped and archived, Helfand said, because she was determined that their pain not be a private experience, but serve a purpose: to contribute to an informed public discussion of "the long-term, complex effect of reproductive technologies in our lives."

Pam Walton, a lesbian who is part of a close community developed over twenty-five years in San Francisco and whose father is a militant right-wing activist who denounces homosexuality, wanted to use the camera to re-establish a relationship, perhaps even to undergo an emotional healing process. She also thought her story touched on larger issues of the meaning of family and community.

E.C.U. is far from alone in the first-person-video documentary field. U.S. public TV's main outlet for experiment is the Independent Television Service (ITVS), set up by Congress in 1989 to encourage imaginative programming. ITVS says personal-essay proposals now make up the largest category of submissions. Britain's BBC in 1990 began a series, Video Diaries, featuring a different person's story each week. (Storytellers tape their own work, but get extensive help in editing.) The show was so popular that Teenage Diaries was inaugurated in 1992.

Small-format video is also an opportunity for social activists who want to increase the variety of points of view on television. The veteran filmmaker Ilan Ziv (Palestinian Diaries; Family Scenes, Stones and M16s [Jewish settler diaries]) long ago abandoned his free-lance work for the BBC and others to work with nonprofessionals who wanted to tell their own stories. A recent project, with Peter Kinoy, was Teen Dreams -- three interwoven stories of poor, inner-city U.S. teen-agers.

 "What's interesting to me," says Kinoy, whose other credits include When the Mountains Tremble, about the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Guatemalan Indian activist Rigoberta Menchœ, "is the idea of people having a public voice they wouldn't have in any other way, a voice that is not totally decided upon by an outsider."

 Some journalists are concerned that video diarists and storytellers may not play by rules that have been painstakingly carved out over the last few decades among professional journalists.

Ellen Hume, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who is now a senior fellow in the Annenberg Washington Program, thinks the advent of vernacular video is "a plus for artistic and democratic reasons, because journalism as practiced by the established institutions is very narrow." On the other hand, she argues, it may never have been more important for journalists to clarify the ethical parameters of their work.

Indeed, the point-of-view perspective of personal video, fueled as it is by passion and sometimes advocacy, can be the antithesis of traditional expectations of balance and objectivity. Frequently videomakers make no claim to objectivity or even to journalism as they understand it. "I don't do journalism, and I don't do windows," growls Golfus, a former National Public Radio free-lancer. He says he simply wants to be seen as an individual with an argument affecting public life.

Fraud is a concern to some editors. "How do you stop the video Janet Cooke?" Newsday's Howard Schneider asked Ellen Schneider at a Neiman Foundation conference on new technologies and journalism. He was referring to a scandal in which The Washington Post discovered that a Pulitzer Prize-winning story had been fudged. "What are your checks and balances?"

Ellen Schneider says fraud was not a major concern in her work because she works with storytellers over months and even years. Says Tom Weinberg, who produced fifty-two hour-long anthologies of often-quirky feature news items in the PBS series The '90s, "Ninety-nine percent of the people who take pictures with video cameras are doing it because they're interested in what they're shooting. They're not trying to fool anybody." It's the programmer's job -- and it's not hard, he says -- to sniff out the one percent. "Worry about the professionals -- look at Forrest Gump and see what they can do with electronic airbrushing."

 Schneider herself raises another question. "Where is that fine line between expressing an opinion and declaring a fact? For example, if someone in Silverlake Life had said AZT simply does not work, do we have responsibility to clarify that, or do we assume that the public will understand that this is simply an opinion expressed by an individual?"

Professionals who shape personal video push to find the narrative in the same way as more traditional producers. David Simpson, co-producer and co-director of When Billy Broke His Head, worked at it until he could see the program as a road movie. Silverlake Life's Tom Joslin seemed always conscious of the requirements of the narrative. A dramatic scene in which he bursts into rage after visiting a doctor was self-recorded twice, apparently because he was unhappy with the technical quality the first time.

This polishing of fact is not new to TV journalists. But it raises the same question -- when does polishing turn fact into fiction? -- that it does in mainstream professional journalism.

A reporter's relationship with sources, a longstanding journalistic concern, is particularly urgent in vernacular video where sources are often the reporter's own immediate family. Pam Walton, the San Francisco lesbian, was finally able to convince her ultraconservative father to meet with her and says the meeting may have opened up new and hopeful possibilities for their relationship. She's now worried about his reception of the finished video. "He knows I'm making it, and he knows he's in it," she says. "But he doesn't realize he's the antihero."

 A more immediate problem than ethics in vernacular video is finding it at all on the small screen. Teen Dreams, largely financed by European TV, will first be seen in this country in theaters. Personal documentaries are most likely to be found on low-rating public television.

Even the small-format work done by experienced journalists since the early '70s has had trouble finding a home in mainstream TV. Jon Alpert, for example, has gone to Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, and China with portable equipment and a distinctive style sometimes called "direct video."(See "Jon Alpert: Odd Man Out," cjr, September/October 1991). But he did not find the networks exactly receptive.

Still, changing economic patterns -- a proliferation of television outlets, for one, and the search for low-budget programming, for another -- have loosened, if only slightly, the grip of the networks. Camcorder work by journalists shows up on local news channels like New York 1 and in some smaller-market stations, and it has become a staple of the investigative dramas of 20/20, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, and other programs.

Last July Nightline ran an entire half-hour documentary, done with a small-format camera, chronicling a week in the life of a small Haitian town. A former 60 Minutes journalist, David Turecamo, had gone free-lance with his own lightweight equipment. To place the story, he worked with Video News International (VNI), an organization that employs some thirty camcorder-armed journalists -- many of them also stringers for radio or magazines -- around the world, and now sells to the top-of-the-line network newsmagazines. And Nightline was delighted to get a piece that, as producer Kathryn Kross said, got "closer to the source of real people and real stories." Turecamo's credentials were an important professional guarantee for her.

 Michael Rosenblum, founder of VNI, thinks established reporters are the best pioneers of small-format journalism, and he expects them to adhere rigorously to existing standards and styles.

The genre could rapidly gain in popularity with the expansion of channel-surfing options and new interactive opportunities. Ed Fouhy, director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, believes that the multiplying of channels with digital compression and the evolution of the information superhighway will "tremendously weaken the gatekeeper function" of traditional journalism.

Says Bill Kovach, head of the Neiman Foundation: "There's a danger if the information channels become clogged with subjective, opinionated information designed to take you to one opinion or the other. When you take journalistic judgment out of it, you can leave people at sea about what, if anything, it means and what, if anything, they can or should be doing about it. And that is destructive to a democratic system."

America's new storytellers are rediscovering the problems that journalists have long confronted. And they may have much to gain from a creative collaboration with the people who have learned to love their role as America's informational gatekeepers -- if both can leap over large cultural gaps.

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