Ieuan franklin
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4.5 The Ethics of EditingAs I observed of Denis Mitchell’s radio features in Chapter 2, there is a sense in which the commitment of the programme maker to give voice to the disempowered can, in some circumstances, make the actuality feature a sort of exercise in collaborative production. However, it must be remembered that what one person may regard as artistic licence or experimentation, another may regard as the mitigation, manipulation or distortion of the ‘raw material’ of oral history. As we noted in Chapter 1, it is important to remember that in many ways the facility to edit magnetic tape has actually represented the reinstatement, rather than the relinquishing, of the kind of meticulous editorial control formerly provided by scripting. Indeed the facility of editing can cause controversy when applied liberally or misapplied: In the hands of an unscrupulous editor a tape can be made to suggest that a speaker said things he did not say. Negatives can be removed, words transposed, whole sentences built up from different sections of the original tape, and when replayed the cuts will be undetectable (Horstmann 1991: 23). The use of tape-recorded actuality in radio features has given ordinary people an opportunity to tell their own stories, to interpret their own lives. Used responsibly, it has meant that the programme-maker’s authorial control has been tempered by the lived experiences of his or her subjects. This important shift is clearly evidenced in the radio work of Denis Mitchell, as discussed in Chapter 2.2. As Mitchell noted of the responsibility of the documentarian: His task is to imply his own view of life (he can never openly state it by any form of editorialising) without distorting the truth that is the lives of the people he has chosen (quoted in Swallow 1966: 178). As the Mitchell quote suggests, the use of actuality may have induced ethical considerations (such as an avoidance of editorializing), but traditional forms of authorship were not radically altered. The empowerment of interviewees through radio features, therefore, has often been more rhetorical than actual, as their involvement has traditionally been restricted to participation in the interview encounter. Whilst this remains the case even a radio producer motivated by a desire to ‘give voice to the voiceless’ may still be vulnerable to accusations of tampering with or degrading the authenticity of the oral evidence. A fitting example of this dilemma can be found in Mancer’s recollection (with its use of ‘scare quotes’ denoting loaded or problematic terms) of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Southern Maryland, and the compilation of this material for an undergraduate project to create a museum audio exhibit: From the ethnographic literature I read, I knew I wanted to make my presence as “transparent” as possible. I didn’t want my “voice” to overshadow the voices of the women I had interviewed. So I made an audio presentation featuring the interviews, formed to a script not unlike the presentations on National Public Radio. My mentors, with their own folklore projects, had their own style and ethics when it came to interviews and presentation – I thought that their insertion of narration, sound effects, and catchy instrumental music bordered on the unethical (Mancer 2006: 2). When it came time for the departmental presentations, Mancer was confident, knowing that hers was the only project to feature prominently the real voices of the people interviewed, and that this meant keeping the results of the research accessible and responsible to the community she had studied: I thought things were going well. And then the departmental wunderkind asked if, with the editing and all, the presentation could be considered “authentic”. I had deleted background noise and sounds, rearranged words, and even transposed bits of conversation in order to get my final product. My confidence was shattered – I realized he had a point. Although it did feature a recording of the actual performance of the interview, in the end the way I had presented my ethnography was really no different than anybody else (Mancer, ibid.). Such an experience will be familiar to any radio producer who has ever harboured an ideal to open up the microphone to the ‘authentic’ vernacular speech of so-called ordinary people. Charles Parker, who pursued this ideal more closely, sensitively and self-consciously than any other radio producer, believed that editing was an artistic process, and emphasised that he did not presume to convey the direct truth of a given situation but rather what John Grierson termed ‘the creative treatment of actuality’: In a society such as ours, whose oral tradition is in decay, the average actuality speaker will transcend himself only occasionally, and it is here that the especial nature of tape – as opposed to disc or wire recording – allows the technician to deploy his own artistry and by selective tape-editing, re-fashion the actuality in a way that reasserts the oral tradition and purges the speech of those elements of utterance which are destructive not only of that tradition, but of the speaker’s actual intentions (Quoted in Street 2004: 192). What Parker explains here is somewhat equivalent to the work of many linguists in apprehending and recovering ‘grammar’; to break through what Saussure termed parole (what Chomsky termed linguistic performance) to langue (what Chomsky termed linguistic competence), the abstract underlying system that constitutes a speaker’s internalised linguistic knowledge: The object of linguistics is competence, not performance; not performance, because performance reflects not only the basic communicative ability of speakers, but also linguistically irrelevant factors – hesitations, slips of the tongue, distractions causing sentences to remain uncompleted or to change structure in mid-course, and so on. A grammar should be a representation of linguistic competence, with all these unfortunate performance factors ‘idealized’ away. Thus a grammar is an hypothesis about unobservables in the minds of speakers, not a mere organized rehearsing of the observed facts of linguistic behaviour (Fowler 1972: 210-211). Glenn Gould felt strongly that if technology facilitated the correction of human error then one could employ it liberally (indeed, to hypothesize about ‘unobservables’). In The Latecomers (1969), Gould’s study of Newfoundland’s geographic, historic and psychological isolation, he refined his editing techniques and his contrapuntal technique of intertwining several vocal streams simultaneously. In this radio documentary he went beyond ‘correction’: he began to change the context of his interviewees’ commentary, he isolated and realigning words in order to create alternative meanings, and he began to sometimes edit out idiosyncratic quirks in their speech patterns (McFarlane 2004). Gould explained the workings of this process in an interview in 1971: Well, we spent – this is no exaggeration – we spent three long weekends…eight hours per day – doing nothing but removing ‘um’s and ‘uh’s, ‘sort of’s and ‘kind of’s, and righting the odd syntactical fluff in his material. We figured at one point that we were four edits of some kind in every typewritten line. There were thirty lines of double-spaced page, so that’s a hundred and twenty edits per page. And there were fourteen pages of his testimony, so we made a conservative guess that there were sixteen hundred edits in that man’s speech alone in order to make him sound lucid and fluid, which he now does. We made a new character out of him. You see - I don’t really care how you do it. I don’t think it’s a moral issue. I don’t think that kind of judgement enters into it (Gould, quoted in McFarlane 2004). Gould maintained that it is permissible and unproblematic to edit and interweave interviews, and even to change a speaker’s ‘character’ as long as the interviewee’s discourse remains coherent, fluent and intact. As Truax has observed, Gould implies that “the listener has greater freedom to evaluate different sides of an argument when they are presented such that one can focus on individual voices at will” (Truax, ibid.).141 However, doing this tends to ‘raid’ the voice for its semantic meaning (Karpf 2009) instead of honouring the specificity of the original dialogic encounter. Digital editing has made such editing so simple and quick to conduct and so commonplace that it is usually taken for granted. We might say that a far swifter and more compressed version of the procedure Gould describes is utilized in media production on a constant basis, for example, in order to create ‘soundbite’ interview extracts to insert into news packages (Brookes 2007). Yet with the occasional exception (Dunaway 2000; Spinelli 2006), the implications of the ubiquity of such editing have not been interrogated or theorized. For example, Dunaway has asked, What are the aesthetic and ethical issues of digital radio production? Does digitally produced radio sound different to the listener? Does it handle content differently? What ethical safeguards need to be added to news and radio production to assure that actualities and ambience beds actually occurred at the same time – that what we are hearing actually took place? (Dunaway 2000: 46). Whereas this thesis has suggested that the use of recording equipment in radio production has extended the medium’s orality/aurality and time-bias, the application of editing can be said to have re-applied the visualization of language and the ‘procedural screening process’ which writing entails. To this end, it is significant that the process of editing is now visual-centric – sound waves are mapped out and dissected on the computer monitor. As the independent radio producer Tatrine Østlund Jacobsen has observed, In digital editing, we watch an overview of sound. But something’s changed: some of sound’s mystery disappears in editing. Voices are more alive when you don’t have to see them. We focus on the image of sound – and you can see too much. In looking, we can miss the tension in his voice that says “he’s lying” (quoted in Dunaway 2000: 38-9). With the kind of editing conducted by Parker and Gould, the radio producer could reproduce what Goody has termed the (visual) ‘backward scanning’ (Goody 1977: 128) of the writing process, making it possible to eliminate inconsistencies, to choose words with a reflexive selectivity that invested the thought and words of the recorded speaker with new discriminatory powers (Ong 1988: 104). Parker believed that careful ‘audio ‘surgery’ could empower the interviewee by recuperating or restoring their linguistic competence. However, it is arguable that, in The Latecomers Gould’s ‘tricks’ sabotage the documentary ‘truth’. As the celebrated BBC features producer Piers Plowright recently opined about the programme, What it seemed to me I was hearing was the work of a man who liked ideas better than people. A man whose very refined musical sense worked against the material, so that ultimately they were pawns in a larger game, or perhaps, to use a better analogy, husky dogs, useful to carry the burdens of the expedition, but not of much account in themselves…In the famous last section [of The Latecomers], for example, where Gould and [Lorne] Tulk slowly move the narrator, Dr Leslie Harris, from Right to Left across the stereo picture, passing but not communicating with the other voices until he merges with the basso continuo of the waves that pound the shore and the voices and the programme finally drown, what we are hearing is a kind of electronic sermon, a verbal coda, a musical game, made up of fragments already heard (Plowright 2007). As if cognizant of these excesses, Gould’s next documentary, The Quiet in the Land, was characterized by far less intervention – there was no relentless keynote sound and little ‘cascading’ of voices – and Gould seemed content to allow the interviewees to speak for themselves. However, the documentary was criticised by some within the Winnipeg Mennonite community that it documented, for misrepresenting their opinions (McFarlane, op. cit.). The problem here can be attributed to Gould’s propensity to fabricate fictional conversations between his subjects, and establish relationships between them through editing and mixing, rather than during the production process.142 Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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