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REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
1. www.terrisfight.org. Accessed April 5-24, 2005.
2. The website text contends as follows: “Terri's behavior does not meet the medical or statutory definition of persistent vegetative state. Terri responds to stimuli, tries to communicate verbally, follows limited commands, laughs or cries in interaction with loved ones, physically distances herself from irritating or painful stimulation and watches loved ones as they move around her. None of these behaviors are simple reflexes and are, instead, voluntary and cognitive. Though Terri has limitations, she does interact purposefully with her environment.” The Terri Schindler-Schiavo Foundation website also includes the following definition of Persistent vegetative state (PVS): According to Florida Statue 765.101:
“Persistent vegetative state means a permanent and irreversible condition of unconsciousness in which there is: (a) The absence of voluntary action or cognitive behavior of ANY kind. (b) An inability to communicate or interact purposefully with the environment.”
See Diane Waldman’s description in this dossier of the origin and nature of the videos as a group.
3. Frank Tomasulo, “’I’ll See It When I Believe It’: Rodney King and the Prison-House of Video,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 76.
4. See also Janet Staiger’s nuanced discussion in this dossier of “interpretative solutions” arrived at by viewers based on a combination of preexisting attitudes and the nature of the media text.
5. Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker, April 4, 2005, 36.
6. Kino-Eye : The Writings of Dziga Vertov, by Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O'Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). For Vertov “Life caught unawares” is a principle of filmmaking. It is also the translation of the title of the film Kinoglaz.
7. Stephen Mamber made the point about watching surveillance footage while presenting his “Center for Hidden Camera Research” website and paper at the conference Interactive Frictions: At the Pressure Point Between Theory and Practice, University of Southern California, June 4-6, 1999. See www.cinema.ucla.edu/Mamber2/
8. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 26-27.
9. See entry for Terri Schiavo at Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo.
10. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fourth Edition (DSM-IV-TR), Task force chairperson, Allen Frances, M.D. (American Psychiatric Association, 2000); entry on “Bulimia Nervosa,” 593.
11. Dawn Myers, “The Relationship between Sexual Abuse and Eating Disorders,”
www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/psychology/health psychology/PSY297.html
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12. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1989), 70.
13. Marguerite Duras Speaks to Michel Beaujour, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 89. Quoted in Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 20.
14. Hirsch, 20.
15. I discuss Ravett’s autobiographical films at length in chapters 5 and 6 of Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California, 2005).
16. “Schiavo Was Beyond Saving, Autopsy Finds,” John-Thor Dahlburg and Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2005, A.1
17. Staiger quotes “Jeffrey C. Alexander and Ronald N. Jacobs, “Mass Communication, Ritual and Civil Society” in Media, Ritual, Identity, ed. Tamar Liebes and James Curren (New York: Routledge, 1998), 29.