Playgrounds of Unlimited Potential: Adaptation, Documentary, and Dogtown and Z-Boys
* Department of English, Salisbury University
E-mail: dtjohnson{at}salisbury.edu
 |
Abstract |
|---|
 TOP Abstract AN UNLIKELY SOURCE TEXT:...ADAPTING STECYK: EXPLICIT...DOCUMENTARY AND ADAPTATION:...References |
|---|
This article begins with the question, what does it mean to adapt in the realm of documentary? Noting at the outset commentary on this issue from Dudley Andrew and Walter Metz, the essay explores the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, a film about the resurgence of popularity of skateboarding in the United States in the mid-1970s—largely, the film argues, through the "Z-Boys," a group of kids who, in attempting to imitate their surfing heroes, substituted the curves of asphalt for those of breaking waves. The central archivist of this period was an artist and photographer named Craig Stecyk, whose "Dogtown articles," in the recently revived Skateboarder magazine, helped celebrate and promote the Z-Boys's style of skateboarding. It is this essay's contention that Dogtown and Z-Boys is an adaptation of Stecyk's writing and, more importantly, his photographs—and that while neither constitute the only source texts, they are nonetheless central to this adaptation. After establishing its focus, the article discusses Stecyk's background and aesthetics and compares his work to Modernist street photography (notably, the Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo). The article then traces some explicit connections to Stecyk within the film—places where he is, in fact, the direct subject—before illustrating some even more important implicit connections between Stecyk's work and the documentary. Finally, after positing that a traditional adaptation studies approach might have to end at this stage (but also suggesting that adaptation studies has an interest in exploring new areas), the essay considers a notoriously difficult concept in cinema studies, excess, and how approaching documentary as an adaptation might inform critical discussions of that concept. The article ends by suggesting, in fact, that documentary studies and adaptation studies, normally discrete areas of cinema studies, might have more to offer one another than has in the past been the case.
Key Words: Documentary • adaptation • excess
two hundred years of american technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground of unlimited potential. but it was the minds of 11 year olds that could see that potential.—Craig Stecyk, 1975, and the opening epigraph to Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001), dir. Stacy Peralta.
This essay begins with a fairly straightforward premise: what does it mean to ‘adapt’ in the realm of documentary? Dudley Andrew, in his famous treatment of adaptation over twenty years ago (in Concepts of Film Theory) remarks in passing that every documentary might be considered an adaptation, since, as he puts it, ‘What is any documentary for that matter except the signification by the cinema of some prior whole, some concept of person, place, event or situation’ (Concepts 97). More recently, Walter C. Metz has treated Travis Wilkerson's experimental documentary An Injury to One as an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest. In his study, Metz makes the case that adaptation might be productively applied to documentary. ‘If one stops to think about it’, writes Metz, ‘documentaries should have always been the stuff of adaptation of nonfiction writing—one thinks, for example, of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me (2004) ...’ (311). Yet, as Metz also points out, documentary has rarely been discussed in light of adaptation, both because ‘this has not historically been the way documentary films get produced, and it most certainly has not been part of the documentary studies’ methodology’ (311). Surely, even without Metz's or Andrew's critiques, we need only look to any typical examples of what people mean by ‘adaptation’ to see that the word almost always connotes ‘narrative’. If, as a field, adaptation studies is interested in expanding the scope of its concerns (as I think it is), then documentary presents a relatively new area to explore.
In light of these issues, this essay begins with an admittedly unlikely object of study: the skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001). The film is a seemingly slapdash but carefully constructed history of a revolution in the sport of skateboarding, one that occurred in the late 1970s, led by a group of kids who, in imitating their surfing heroes, substituted the curves of asphalt for those of breaking waves. While director Stacy Peralta retains principal credit for the film's creation, if one were to identify the most frequently acknowledged archivist of this history within the film, it would have to be artist, writer, and photographer Craig Stecyk. Stecyk's early involvement with these skaters stemmed from his partial ownership of the surf shop which initially sponsored them, but he had also been a working artist known in the surfing community for years before skateboarding began to flourish again as a sport. He has both a co-writing credit on the film (with Peralta) and a production design credit as well, but he is also partly the film's subject, with Dogtown and Z-Boys returning frequently to a series of photographic essays he produced in the late 1970s for the magazine Skateboarder under pseudonyms such as ‘Carl Izan, Sam Fernando, John Smythe or Lowboy’ (Weyland 88). And while the writing in these articles is undoubtedly important to the film—one hears in the voiceover, co-written by Stecyk and voiced in laconic delivery by actor Sean Penn, the clear echo of those earlier pieces—the photography occupies an even more important position. Of course, Stecyk's photographs are not the only ones used in the film; co-credit for principal archive photography is shared by Glen E. Friedman, and fifteen other people are thanked in the film's credits for having provided some of the archival images. (In fact, the list may be even longer, as the filmmakers include an apology to any others whose work they were presumably unable to identify.) That said, Stecyk's images are central to this film in ways both clearly articulated and indirectly acknowledged. The film is, this essay will argue, an adaptation of Stecyk's photographs, with all of the conceptual problems inherent therein.
In fact, it is the hope of this essay that the very tenuousness of that statement will lead to some productive ways in which we may begin thinking about adaptation outside its traditional confines—here, in the relatively new area of documentary. To be sure, this film would not seem to present an ideal test case for documentary as adaptation, given that it is not adapting anything in the traditional sense; there is no single, clearly delineated source text as such. And yet, what is perhaps most useful about the film is its relationship with this source text (in particular, the photography of Craig Stecyk), one that is both strong and, at the same time, illusory, and one that is unusual in the medium of the source text itself—not only writing, as in traditional adaptation studies, but more importantly, photography. One might object, of course, that adaptations of photography are outside the purview of a journal whose subtitle is ‘The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies’, given that these photographs do not constitute literature as such. But if the field of adaptation studies is interested in exploring areas outside its more traditional bounds, then adaptations of the image, rather than the word, suggest a potentially productive area of research, one in keeping with a renewed spirit of genuine inquiry that the discipline seems to be undergoing at the moment. (In addition, we might also consider a publication such as Skateboarder magazine to fall somewhat broadly, though no less importantly, under the term ‘literary’.)
Thus, because so little has been written about documentary and adaptation studies, as well as adaptations of the image, the more unusual aspects of this case are what make it more attractive and critically generative, as the essay reflects both on this film and on documentary adaptation more broadly considered, though by no means in order to suggest that every documentary—if not every documentary adaptation—functions in the same way, for every audience, at any given historical moment. Rather, by examining Dogtown and Z-Boys as an individual study in these issues, this essay hopes to initiate, ideally, what could be a much broader range of discussions, involving scholars in both adaptation and documentary studies, in terms of what adaptation in the field of documentary might mean.
|
AN UNLIKELY SOURCE TEXT: THE WORK OF CRAIG STECYK |
|---|
|
TOPAbstractAN UNLIKELY SOURCE TEXT:...ADAPTING STECYK: EXPLICIT...DOCUMENTARY AND ADAPTATION:...References |
|---|
Of the figures at the heart of the Dogtown history, the artist, writer, and photographer Craig Stecyk rightfully holds an important place, and it is very much a place that he has literally written and photographed himself into. Stecyk grew up in Santa Monica, California, surfing, as well as ‘diving, fishing, boating and open ocean swimming’; his father, who had been a war photographer, worked at the Lincoln Mercury assembly plant and also had an avid interest in custom-made cars (Colburn 5). Given this background, it is difficult not to read Stecyk's later aesthetic interests through this early juxtaposition of coastal culture, photography, and urban industry. As an adult, Stecyk began producing art in what might be thought of as California Dadaism. His piece Bomb Plant (1968) involved burying a military surplus bomb on the beach on a busy holiday weekend; then, he arrived in a ‘tan jump suit’ to ‘defuse’ the bomb. As Bolton T. Colburn observes in his catalogue essay for a Laguna Beach exhibition of Stecyk's work, Papa Moana, ‘This proto-performance ‘happening’ reflects the bravado of the surf culture, well known for its inspired guerrilla pranks’ (7). Stecyk was also deeply interested in graffiti as both a popular and invisible art—one that drew attention to itself but not necessarily the artist (except for those who recognized its symbols). This interest in graffiti would later become part of his signature style of surfboards at the Zephyr Surf Shop (where the Z-Boys team would come into being). (Colburn 6) And much of his work has involved a fascination with chance (again, linking him with Dadaism's own fascination with chance, especially in the work of Marcel Duchamp). Wave Shot (1970), for example, made use of a camera mounted on a buoy, one that took pictures of waves unprompted by the artist (with a device triggered by a wave's natural motion); Art Trash (1983) was essentially a pile of second-hand art bought by Stecyk and piled into the middle of a museum floor; and Deep Six (1985) involved his manufacturing several bronze torsos and submerging them in various locations in what he called ‘reverse historification’ for future anthropologists (Colburn 11–17).
In terms of the history at the heart of this film, Stecyk, in the mid-1970s, was living in an area of Santa Monica which Skip Engblom claims Stecyk himself, in a conversation with Engblom on one hot summer day (a ‘dog day’), coined as ‘Dogtown’ (Dogtown and Z-Boys). With Engblom and surfboard shaper Jeff Ho, Stecyk was part-owner of the surf shop Zephyr Surfboards; it was here that the Zephyr skate team eventually assembled (which is where the Z of ‘Z-Boys’ comes from). Stecyk quickly became one of the main documentarians of this moment, largely through a series of articles and photographs that he authored for the magazine Skateboarder, beginning with ‘Aspects of the Downhill Slide’ in the fall of 1975 (written under the pseudonym Carlos Izan).
This article is typical of Stecyk's aesthetic and in many ways echoes the same concerns of his art. The writing mimics the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson (as Jake Phelps notes in the film); here, skaters seem to live somewhere near the margins, visible only to initiates who know where to look or to the authorities who resist this encroachment (not unlike the graffiti that fascinated Stecyk). At the outset of ‘Aspects of the Downhill Slide’, Stecyk describes a meeting at the Lucky Market near Ocean Park Heights with ‘a local legend and true veteran of the psychedelic wars known only as Spencer’ (2). After a conspiratorial discussion involving ‘cosmic and demonic truths’, Spencer sets off to ride down a canyon road ‘twenty-three miles in length’ (and ‘site of numerous automobile mishaps caused by brake failures on the steep curves’ (2)). Stecyk describes his departure in this way: ‘Without a moment's hesitation, he pushed off for fifty yards and hurtled straight down the hill out of sight. That was the last anyone ever saw of him. His friends figure he rode it out and went off in search of steeper flights’ (2). This sense of high adventure mixed with resistance to official authority—and mainstream culture—is something that runs through many of Stecyk's articles.
In some respects, however, the photographs that accompany the articles are even more important in terms of communicating a whole set of ideas about skateboarding and what it should be (as well as the new stars of the sport, the Zephyr team). As an example, one might look to the first photograph in this same article. It is a picture of the skateboarder Tony Alva and it is typical of Stecyk's distinct style: a black-and-white figure in motion, one who is crouched down and riding the steep curve of an asphalt bank. What is compelling here, however, is not only the skater but an equal interest in the environment surrounding the skater; while the main subject of the photograph is Alva, he's framed off-centre, at the top of the picture, so that the viewer is encouraged to note cracks in the asphalt, shadows thrown by a late-day sun, and a chain-link fence. This framing is partly for pragmatic magazine layout restrictions, leaving room for quotations (or ‘pull quotes’) over photographs, but the style nonetheless situates the subject (here, Alva) in direct relation to the environment in which he skates (see Figures 1 and 2, a single take of the photograph within the film which pans up the image and demonstrates the off-centre framing). Indeed, Stecyk's photographs not only underscore the acrobatic moves of his subjects but they also document a ruined landscape of abandoned playgrounds, broken sidewalks, empty swimming pools, and graffiti covering nearly everything.
|
The photographs are thus, in their own right, aesthetic experiences, ones that do not just illustrate the article so much as provide imaginative touchstones for young skaters who dream themselves into the moment of Alva's crouching through a turn—and, at the same time, illustrate forgotten wastelands left in the wake of industrial progress. In terms of their aesthetics, they seem to recall Modernist street photography as much as anything; one might compare Stecyk's work with that of the Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, for example, given the latter's particular take on street culture. In his own work, Alvarez Bravo often juxtaposes inanimate objects of the street with actual people so that an interaction that is impossible in life becomes possible in the image. Consider The Collision (1967), which captures a boy walking down a street in front of a wall painting of a car crash, so that they appear to ‘collide’ with one another. In an earlier photograph, Conversation near the Statue, Mexico City (1934), a group of men speak near a statue of a figure reclining; the juxtaposition, however, creates the illusion that the statue, as Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz put it, ‘eavesdrop[s] on a conversation nearby’ (196). In their study Bystander: A History of Street Photography, Westerbeck and Meyerowitz describe Alvarez Bravo's aesthetic in this way: ‘The world in which Alvarez Bravo himself has lived is an animistic one. He sees everything from statues to old newspapers blowing in the wind as if they were alive .... There are signs of life everywhere, if only one knows how to look’ (196). While Stecyk's photography does not suggest that the asphalt slopes which skaters ride have somehow come ‘alive’, he certainly shares an affinity with Alvarez Bravo's interest in the interaction between street environment and subject (even if, in Stecyk's photography, such interaction is actively sought by the subject rather than, as in Alvarez Bravo's work, created solely through the lens of the photographer). For Stecyk, this environment is one that is to be both celebrated and critiqued—his work attempts to look critically at the decaying industrial landscape, but to find solace in the skateboarder's desire to use that decay for other, more positive purposes (as ‘playgrounds of unlimited potential’). Of course, one need only consider the primary audience for Stecyk's work—youth buying copies of Skateboarder magazine at local convenience stores, a readership that had perhaps never heard of street photographers like Alvarez Bravo but nonetheless were absorbing a similar aesthetic put to much different ends—to appreciate the complex kinds of cultural exchanges brought about by the last century and the one in which we now live.
Of course, these cultural exchanges are, in their own way, adaptations—here, of Modernist photography to later twentieth-century skateboarding magazines. Thirty years later, another adaptation process occurs in the film Dogtown and Z-Boys, both a documentary of a moment in skateboarding history and an adaptation of Stecyk's work. This adaptation process occurs throughout the film, in ways both directly acknowledged and subtly implied.
|
ADAPTING STECYK: EXPLICIT CONNECTIONS, IMPLICIT ADAPTATIONS |
|---|
|
TOPAbstractAN UNLIKELY SOURCE TEXT:...ADAPTING STECYK: EXPLICIT...DOCUMENTARY AND ADAPTATION:...References |
|---|
Although one finds references to Stecyk throughout the film, his presence is acutely felt in the opening four minutes. In fact, Dogtown and Z-Boys may be one of the few cases of an adaptation beginning with the production credit: the opening image of Vans ‘Off the Wall’ Productions, before the film has started, already cites Stecyk (see Figure 3). This image is in black-and-white, with the text made to look like graffiti; given how often Stecyk's photographs incorporated graffiti into them—and given that they were, in the Dogtown articles, almost always black-and-white—this opening credit invokes Stecyk's articles directly. The image also is made to look and sound as though it comes from a film projector cranking to life, much as Stecyk's own photography openly acknowledges its medium-specific properties (in the sequence shots, e.g., made to look like contact prints).
|
After this initial reference to Stecyk, the film shifts into more explicit kinds of invocations of his work, including the film's epigraph (also the epigraph of this essay), taken from Stecyk's writing: ‘two hundred years of american technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground of unlimited potential. but it was the minds of 11 year olds that could see that potential’ (Dogtown and Z-Boys). Opening the film with these words, in combination with the production credit, makes a clear, explicit connection for the viewer between this film and Steyck's work, a connection underscored even further at about the two-minute mark of the opening four minutes (which function as a kind of overture or prologue to the entire film). Here, after several skaters have talked about Dogtown as the origins of the ‘revolution’ in skating (as Tony Alva recalls), an older Wentzle Ruml notes, ‘It was cool to be in the magazines and stuff, but you know, the bottom line was all we wanted to do was skate’ (Dogtown and Z-Boys). After this, a rapid montage of several of Stecyk's photographs leads into a photograph of Stecyk himself, sitting next to a swimming pool with his camera as a skater turns on the side of a pool, the shot zooming in on Stecyk within the photograph as a voiceover from Skip Engblom paraphrases the opening epigraph (this, before Stecyk has been properly introduced to the viewer): ‘Craig understood that, like, children took the ruins of the twentieth century and made art out of it’ (Dogtown and Z-Boys). As Engblom speaks, the film cuts to his image in an interview before cutting back to more Stecyk photographs. A voiceover makes no pretence about crediting Stecyk with the original archiving of the Dogtown skaters: ‘The Dogtown articles were the brainchild of 26-year-old artist and photojournalist Craig Stecyk. Using a handful of pseudonyms, Stecyk would conceive, write, photograph and design the aesthetic that would come to define the Dogtown movement’. Eventually, the overture cedes to the title sequence, but not before having spent almost half of its time explicitly focused on Stecyk. Devoting so much of this overture to Stecyk is, in its own way, an open acknowledgement of the extent to which what follows relies on—and, as this essay is arguing, even adapts—his work.
The other most explicit acknowledgement of Stecyk comes around the 54-minute mark (about two-thirds of the way through the film) when Dogtown and Z-Boys once again pays homage to Stecyk. Here, the voiceover echoes the beginning of the film almost word for word, noting, ‘Stecyk's words and photographs became the template for the attitude and aesthetic that would come to define the culture of modern-day skateboarding’ (Dogtown and Z-Boys). Interviews also pay tribute to Stecyk, with the musician Henry Rollins singling out the photographs in particular: ‘The photos really translated the velocity of the move, the way you guys were living; they said way more than, ‘Here's a guy on a skateboard.’ They showed a lifestyle, they showed an attitude, they showed a code’ (Dogtown and Z-Boys). All the while, the camera scans over Stecyk's photographs, both within shots that indicate the context of the magazine (where we see the borders of the image and even, at times, the original article's pages) and within shots that move into the image so closely, one loses track of the borders. By foregrounding his work in both the opening and this later section, the film sets itself up in direct relation to Stecyk's articles and photographs (and acknowledges that debt openly). Indeed, it is difficult not to think of the film as the organic extension of these images picked up some twenty-five years later, in part by the same artist, re-contextualizing them into the new space of this documentary.
But is an ‘organic extension’ (or a ‘re-contextualization’) the same as an ‘adaptation’? Perhaps more convincing in regard to the idea of adaptation are the implicit connections, given that they are more prevalent, if more fleeting. Take, for example, the format of the interviews themselves; those interviews conducted in the ‘present’ (i.e., footage shot specifically for this production) use a black-and-white palette. Stecyk's photographs from the heyday of his work on Dogtown are also often in black-and-white (again, linking him with the Modernist street photography), and this subtle but important connection means that nearly all of the interviews have the source of their mise-en-scène in the original photographs produced for Skateboarder magazine. Frequently, too, within that mise-en-scène, the subject is positioned against a backdrop that recalls the decayed urban environs of Stecyk's photography; given that Stecyk himself is credited with production design, this connection is not surprising. Glen E. Friedman, for example, looks as though he is actually present at one of the asphalt parks from Stecyk's photos (a director and editor commentary identifies it as Paul Revere Junior High School, one of the popular skating locations; see Figure 4); here, the asphalt is even more decayed than in Stecyk's photography, signalling not only the aging of the sport but also the aging of the Zephyr team (such aging also reflected in the frequent juxtapositions of former team members in the ‘present’ with their images in the past.) The backgrounds for the other interviews are also similarly placed in environs invoking Stecyk's work, and in fact, Stecyk himself, when he appears later in the film, is actually standing in front of old scrap-heap car bodies, reminding the viewer of his aesthetic interests in detritus and urban ruin. (Stecyk's interview is also the only one in colour, which again seems to denote his presence in relation to the other interviews.) The interviews thus tend to invoke Stecyk's work in a strong adaptation-related way, given how closely they recall the style and content of his earlier photographs.
|
A perhaps more tenuous, though important connection exists through the testimony and work of the other source of principal archival photography, Glen E. Friedman; in many ways, Friedman's presence within the film itself evokes Stecyk, given the openly acknowledged debt which Friedman describes. In the opening of the film, for example, he says, ‘I was like twelve years old and I'm reading these articles, and you don't know where your place is in the world yet, and you read these words and the things that he had to say and the way he said them, and the photographs that accompanied them, and it was like, wow, you know, I'm really part of something incredible, something important’ (Dogtown and Z-Boys). The editing slows at this moment, with a much longer take of Friedman delivering these words, emphasizing them even further. Elsewhere, in a collection called Dogtown: The Legend of Z-Boys (a text released in conjunction with the film, anticipating the interest the film would create in both Stecyk's and Friedman's work), Friedman notes succinctly, ‘I personally credit this man as the single largest influence on my work’ (vii). In this light, it might not be going too far to say that Friedman's photographs themselves invoke Stecyk, given this early acknowledgement of Stecyk's powerful influence on Friedman (despite Friedman's own stylistic signature).
One of the most subtle but important ways in which this film adapts Stecyk's work is in its frequent, if fleeting use of archival photographs in sequences that often last a few seconds or less. In these moments, images appear and disappear, often flashing across the screen for an instant during a transition or to accompany voiceover. For example, at roughly the 26-minute mark, the film reflects on the important influence of Larry Bertlemann, a surfer whose style the Zephyr team members openly imitated in their skateboarding moves, such as his crouched position, his way of turning on the waves (‘cutbacks’), and his putting his hands in the water as he surfed (the Zephyr team imitating this by putting their hands on the ground). The section begins with footage of Bertlemann surfing; Zephyr team members in the present discussing his importance; and Super-8 archival footage of Zephyr skaters making moves very similar to Bertlemann (indeed, the visual similarities are striking and make the argument for Bertlemann's influence as much as, if not more than, the voiceover). At one point, Skip Engblom reflects on the style and its origins in surfing, saying, ‘We were surfers, first and foremost, and the low pivotal style in surfing is really functional. It also has a beautiful aesthetic’ (Dogtown). As he begins to say ‘low pivotal style’, the film cuts to Stecyk's iconic image of Jay Adams, the one that functions as the movie poster (yet another way the film acknowledges its adaptive roots with Stecyk; see Figure 5). Here, the film uses two different framings of the original photograph and dissolves one over the other before cutting to six photographs, three of which are most definitely Stecyk's (images of Nathan Pratt, Tony Alva [the same image from ‘Aspects of the Downhill Slide’], and Stacy Peralta), and the three of which are almost certainly his as well (and, if not, are so close to his style as to cite him nonetheless). This entire sequence lasts only seven seconds—hardly a significant amount of time when compared to the film as a whole. Yet such sequences are not at all uncommon in the film, and together, they provide a fabric of adaptive source material, a constant reminder of Stecyk's work as a source text that is explicitly acknowledged through two tributes, at the beginning and at the 54-minute mark; that is implicitly acknowledged, in interviews, in Friedman's own work, and in brief montages such as this one; and even, to use a tidal metaphor, that seems to submerge at times as other sources overtake it, only to reappear later, not unlike the natural motion captured in Stecyk's Wave Shot.
|
What should be clear by now is the extent to which Dogtown and Z-Boys relies on the work of Craig Stecyk (particularly in terms of his photography). It could certainly be argued, however, at this point, that the film is not an adaptation—that this essay has simply not made its case. In a strict use of the term adaptation, the film is perhaps too loosely drawing on Stecyk's work—and drawing too liberally on other work—to consider it an adaptation. Add to that complication the fact that the source text is photography rather than a literary text (though Stecyk's words are also important) as well as the fact that the film is not a narrative film but a documentary, and a traditional adaptation studies approach would necessarily have to end here, as a failure. But given that the field of adaptation studies is clearly pushing itself in new directions, we might simply ask at this point what might be gained by eschewing anxieties routed in more traditional approaches and allowing that this film, a documentary, may be an adaptation. It is the contention of this essay that by mixing modes—by approaching this film as adaptation and documentary—we gain access to some important issues that both adaptation studies and documentary studies might productively explore. In doing so, we may even begin to understand how documentary and adaptation studies might benefit from a more close alliance than has traditionally been the case.
|
DOCUMENTARY AND ADAPTATION: FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS |
|---|
|
TOPAbstractAN UNLIKELY SOURCE TEXT:...ADAPTING STECYK: EXPLICIT...DOCUMENTARY AND ADAPTATION:...References |
|---|
To begin this section with another question, the reader at this point may simply ask what is the difference between a source and a source text and might Stecyk's work simply be the former more than the latter? To put it more bluntly, at one point does adaptation cede into something else entirely? Thomas Leitch's recent Film Adaptation & its Discontents articulates this issue particularly well in his chapter entitled, ‘Between Adaptation and Allusion’, where he defines several degrees of adaptation, moving further and further, as the chapter progresses, toward allusion. Allusion, for example, as Leitch illustrates, might include the references to Scarface (1932) and Citizen Kane (1941) in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959)—short, momentary jokes that depend on an intertextual connection between two films but do not in themselves represent adaptations. But Leitch admits the difficulty in delineating the clear boundaries of adaptation and allusion. In concluding his chapter, he cautions, ‘Both adaptation and allusion are clearly intelligible only within a broader study of intertextuality that will not begin until students of adaptation abandon their fondness for huddling on the near end of the slippery slope between adaptation and allusion, where categorical distinctions seem seductively plausible’ (126).
Current adaptation scholars, Leitch leading among them, have taken just these steps—that is, toward abandoning a fondness for more clearly delineated cases of adaptation and, in the process, challenging what we mean by adaptation in the first place. One common strategy in this process has been to move toward the term intertextuality, whose recent use we see in Leitch, Walter Metz, Linda Hutcheon (whose 2006 A Theory of Adaptation notes, at the outset, ‘I have always had a strong interest in what has come to be called ‘intertextuality’ or the dialogic relations among texts’ (xiii)), and Julie Sanders (whose 2006 Adaptation and Appropriation distinguishes between the titular concepts but considers both to be ‘a subsection of the over-arching practice of inter-textuality’ (17)). Given the general opening of adaptation studies, whether through redefining its boundaries, shifting the discussion to intertextuality, or both, considering Dogtown and Z-Boys an adaptation of Stecyk's work does not seem to be at all out of keeping with the general momentum of the field. What might be less clear is what is to be gained in the process.
In the case of this documentary, if not documentary in general, what might be gained is a greater awareness for a notoriously difficult concept in film studies: excess. In his essay ‘The Aesthetics of Ambiguity’, documentary editor and critic Dai Vaughan draws a fundamental distinction between documentary and narrative, one he refers to as ‘subtle but absolute’ (80). He explains this distinction through the familiar analogy of cinema to language, positing individual images as ‘linguistic elements’ caught in a ‘total discourse’ of a film. Rather than explore the semiotic tradition within film studies, however, in order to explain this analogy (a tradition his discussion would seem to call for), Vaughan instead makes the following provocation:
In fiction, the elements are exhausted in the production of the overall meaning of the text; and anything which cannot be read as contributing to this meaning is consigned to a limbo of insignificance. In documentary, by contrast, the elements are seen as always exceeding their contribution to any given meaning; and they remain always open to scrutiny either for their own sakes or for their potential in the generation of new meanings oblique, peripheral, or even antagonistic to the text as understood (80).
For Vaughan, such ‘new meanings’ are generated because documentary always has a certain degree of excess, and ‘that excess is present in the images, in their potential always to reveal—under different interrogations—aspects of the pro-filmic hitherto unremarked’ (80). Extending his discussion even further, he makes yet another analogy—here, to poetry: ‘In this respect, then, the verbal affinities of documentary are with poetry, since the resistance of its elements to total absorption in the discourse represents a resistance against the drift toward pure symbolism’ (81).
One could easily take issue with some or all of Vaughan's argument here, as there are certainly some documentaries that do not themselves encourage viewers to read beyond the image's integration into the whole (and that do not encourage any engagement with that ‘excess’). By the same token, there are many narrative films that do not close off meanings ‘oblique, peripheral, or even antagonistic to the text as understood’ (80), and several writers have treated the notion of excess in fiction film (notably Kristin Thompson in her well known essay, ‘The Concept of Cinematic Excess’). Yet Vaughan's argument offers a valuable perspective on excess in documentary. As he notes, earlier in the same essay, ‘As viewers, in electing to perceive a film as documentary, we do not reject a fictive option for a known nonfiction, but rather select a mode of apprehension in full knowledge of our own ignorance’ (79). This idea—that of ‘select[ing] a mode of apprehension in full knowledge of our own ignorance’—is encouraged by our perception that what we are seeing at any given time is somehow connected to the historical reality that has been filmed—not because we recognize in the image a clearly legible relationship to that history but rather because we are willing to acknowledge our own distance from the profilmic reality of the image (and the resulting complexity and possibility for multiple readings of that reality). Here, a belief in the connection between an image and profilmic reality, while indexical, does not lead to a naive reading of reality through the image as a kind of window to the world; rather, a belief, in this case, between that image and profilmic reality is to acknowledge the inherent distance between a viewer of a documentary image and the profilmic reality that he or she sees (as well as the inherent complexity in trying to decipher any kind of historical legibility). In any case, the tendency to read the image as documentary ultimately comes from the viewer, and to read the documentary images as generating meanings ‘oblique, peripheral, or even antagonistic to the text as understood’, there must be a catalyst, whether it is something inherent to the film, an active viewing strategy from the viewer, the reception context, or some other aspect.
Putting aside, for the moment, what that catalyst might be, we might consider further the idea of excess, an admittedly difficult concept. It is, like the sublime, defined by its inability to be defined exactly, and Vaughan is not the only documentary critic to have attempted to define it. For Bill Nichols, in his 1991 study Representing Reality, excess is not a property exclusive to documentary so much as an aspect of film that, in the case of fiction films, ‘exceed[s] the centripetal force of narrative’ (141). Drawing on David Bordwell's Narration in the Fiction Film, Nichols describes excess in narrative film as ‘the random and inexplicable, that which remains ungovernable within a textual regime presided over by narrative’ (141). Working in light of work by Charles Altman, Dana Polan, and Richard Dyer, Nichols uses this analogy in order to set up his own sense of excess as it exists in documentary, where it ‘stands beyond the reach of both narrative and exposition’ (142). For Nichols, excess in documentary is ‘history’: ‘As the referent of documentary, history is always what stands outside the text.... Always referred to but never captured, history, as excess, rebukes those laws set to contain it; it contests, qualifies, resists, and refuses them’ (142). He continues with his discussion of excess, and at the end of this treatment, he comes close to replicating Vaughan's own sense of excess in relation to documentary versus narrative: ‘Even more than fiction, where the text may motivate virtually everything that we see and hear (motivate in the sense of provide justification for its presence), documentary must constantly bear the burden of historical excess itself. It must also bear the burden, and glory, of the compelling quality of this historical evidence’ (149).
If there is a catalyst for such readings, adaptation studies provides a particularly attractive one, since it asks the viewer to engage actively in reconsidering and reimagining the original context of the archival materials as they have been appropriated—or, to go one step further, adapted—for the purposes of a film (the important distinction of Sanders's thoughtful, engaging study notwithstanding). It approaches the documentary not as a singular account of history but as an adaptation of already existing competing histories, ones recorded in pieces over the years, in archival footage, photography, writing, and even memory, revealed in interviews from participants in the present. This idea of multiple, competing versions of history comes closer to the ongoing project of more contemporary documentary filmmakers and critics who challenge any singular version of events and instead allow for multiple, even contradictory ones that reflect an experience of history necessarily always fragmented and incomplete. Michael Renov has written eloquently on this topic in The Subject of Documentary, particularly in his chapter ‘Documentary Disavowals and the Digital’, where he cites ‘those in contemporary art and philosophy that question models of mastery or absolute certainty, placing greater emphasis on open-endedness, empathy, and receptivity’ (130). In the case of Dogtown and Z-Boys, while, as has already been acknowledged, the stakes of that history are relatively low, reading the film as adaptation nonetheless makes for a more active viewing process for the viewer—one certainly less tied to certainty and much more to ‘open-endedness’. One is forced out of the ‘text as understood’, to use Vaughan's words—that is, what the film presents as its account of the Zephyr team's history—and instead is asked to remember the original context of these images (i.e., in terms of Stecyk's contributions). While this process is very much like reading a narrative film in terms of its original text (and in terms of adaptation studies’ much contested and, if we believe Simone Murray—as I do—much overwrought term fidelity (5–6)), here, in the context of the documentary, recalling the source text actually encourages the unsettling of any one reading of the film.
As a result of seeing this film as adaptation, individual images thus seem at times untethered from the context of the film, becoming, in the process, sites of inquiry. When Stecyk took Hawk's picture that day, how many other attempts had he made to climb the slope? Did he fall, and if he did, when? How long had he been skating in the more crouched position? Did he yet perceive the potential to earn money from the sport, and is the potential for commercialism necessarily prohibitive to creativity (an issue close to many historical debates within film studies over Hollywood cinema)? What about the location itself? Had it been abandoned, or was it merely temporarily unoccupied? Why was a fence erected in the first place—what were its original owners trying to keep out (or in)? What was this space's original purpose within this community, and how did the Z-Boys’ use of that space either critique or ironically confirm larger economic realities of industrial expansion and waste in the late twentieth century? Such speculations on the profilmic reality within the image and the kinds of questions raised by it are also even further expanded in light of viewing a photograph within a film, or a document of a document—Stecyk's photograph within the larger documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. The gap between the film and its source becomes even more pronounced in this consideration. And once we begin asking questions about individual photographs—documents within the documentary—the entire film seems to open as well. Can we trust this version of Jay Adams, who has since critiqued his depiction in the film (on the DVD extras of Lords of Dogtown (2005))? Or has Peralta represented him fairly (if not others as well)? Does the sponsorship by Vans productions undermine the film's reliability, not to mention Peralta's and Stecyk's own roles here as historians of their own contributions? Or does the enthusiasm demonstrated by so many of the film's participants, who clearly enjoy recalling their adventures sneaking into swimming pools, hiding from the police in trees (as Peralta himself recounts), or shoplifting skateboard materials from the hardware store, necessarily mitigate these concerns?
To put it succinctly, even in a film such as Dogtown and Z-Boys, questions linger—not necessarily ones that always undermine the film itself, but questions nonetheless. The film may not be prepared to answer these questions, but it is enough that an adaptation studies approach simply raises them. And it is not to create a sense of relativism that this approach might be usefully considered. Rather, it is to cause the viewer to approach the film not as an end in itself but as the beginning of a larger inquiry. Here, the viewer may not wish to know more about the sport of skateboarding or socio-economic realities of Southern California, and that is certainly one possibility. But opening up the film to multiple meanings allows for questions of reliability to be considered beyond the film; doing so allows for the viewer to speculate on a history that is, in this light, far more strange and out of reach than the film might initially suggest (a version of history many viewers might find more appealing, despite the clear pleasures that the film already affords).
Thinking about Dogtown and Z-Boys as adaptation thus seems to provide some useful ways to consider this particular account of the history of a sport. It also suggests that reading documentaries as adaptations may generate productive ways of thinking about individual films and documentary studies more broadly considered—ways that might benefit the discipline's continued interest in the difficulties of representing history in much larger ways, not only in more recent films that consciously articulate that difficulty but in much earlier films as well (where we find, as Renov puts it, an ‘aggressive—indeed, pulverizing—self-assurance in the pursuit of Truth...’ (135)). Thinking of a documentary as an adaptation may be one way of disjoining that ‘self-assurance’; in opening the distance between a film and its source (or an adaptation and its source text), we create a critical space to reinvestigate the past as it has been recounted in meanings both within and outside the text (especially in other films, where the stakes of representing history are exponentially higher). Likewise, within adaptation studies, as we move further and further away from fidelity studies, we are necessarily going to open the distance between an adaptation and its source; both will become much more dependent on their original contexts, leading the way for the kinds of studies that, for example, Simone Murray has recently proposed toward ‘materializing adaptation theory’ (4–20). Yet even if one does not adopt Murray's particular approach, the larger opening of the distance between an adaptation and its object will necessarily move our field into new, productive directions, ones in which the status of any one adaptation or source text may become unsettled and, in the process, critically revealing, toward potentials perhaps not as ‘unlimited’ as the playgrounds of these skaters—but potentials nonetheless.
|
References |
|---|
|
TOPAbstractAN UNLIKELY SOURCE TEXT:...ADAPTING STECYK: EXPLICIT...DOCUMENTARY AND ADAPTATION:...References |
|---|
-
Andrew Dudley. Concepts in Film Theory (1984) Oxford: Oxford UP.
Colburn Bolton T. "The Boy King." In: Papa Moana: Craig Stecyk (1989) Laguna Beach, CA: Laguna Art Museum. 5–29.
Dogtown and Z-Boys. Dir. Stacy Peralta. Written by Stacy Peralta and Craig Stecyk. Vans "Off the Wall" Productions, 2001.
Friedman Glen E. Introduction. In: Dogtown: The Legend of the Z-Boys (2000) New York: Burning Flags. vii–ix.
Hutcheon Linda. A Theory of Adaptation (2006) London: Routledge.
Leitch Thomas. Film Adaptation & Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (2007) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Lords of Dogtown. Dir. Catherine Hardwicke. Perf. Emile Hirsch, Victor Rasuk, John Robinson, and Heath Ledger. Columbia Pictures, 2005.
Metz Walter C. "Documentary as Adaptation: An Intertextual Analysis of An Injury to One." Literature/Film Quarterly. 35(2007):307–12.
Murray Simone. "Materialising Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry." Literature/Film Quarterly. 36(2008):4–20.
Nichols Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (1991) Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Renov Michael. The Subject of Documentary (2004) Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
Sanders Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation (2006) London: Routledge.
Stecyk CR. "Aspects of the Downhill Slide. In: Skateboarder Fall 1975. Dogtown: The Legend of the Z-Boys (2000) New York: Burning Flags. 1–8.
Thompson Kristin. "The Concept of Cinematic Excess." In: Film Theory and Criticism—Braudy Leo, Cohen Marshall, eds. (2004) 6th ed. Oxford: Oxford UP. 513–24.
Vaughan Dai. For Documentary: Twelve Essays (1999) Berkeley: U of California P.
Westerbeck Colin, Meyerowitz Joel. Bystander: A History of Street Photography (1994) Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Weyland Jocko. The Answer Is Never: A Skateboarder's History of the World (2002) New York: Grove.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||