How the Moving Image Has Become the Medium of Record: Part 2

East­man giv­ing Edi­son the first roll of movie film, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

This piece picks up where Part 1 of Peter Kauf­man’s arti­cle left off yes­ter­day…

The epis­te­mo­log­i­cal night­mare we seem to be in, bom­bard­ed over our screens and speak­ers with so many mov­ing-image mes­sages per day, false and true, is at least in part due to the paral­y­sis that we – schol­ars, jour­nal­ists, and reg­u­la­tors, but also pro­duc­ers and con­sumers – are still exhibit­ing over how to anchor facts and truths and com­mon­ly accept­ed nar­ra­tives in this seem­ing­ly most ephemer­al of media.  When you write a sci­en­tif­ic paper, you cite the evi­dence to sup­port your claims using notes and bib­li­ogra­phies vis­i­ble to your read­ers.  When you pub­lish an arti­cle in a mag­a­zine or a jour­nal or a book, you present your sources – and now when these are online often enough live links will take you there.  But there is, as yet, no ful­ly formed appa­ra­tus for how to cite sources with­in the online videos and tele­vi­sion pro­grams that have tak­en over our lives – no Chica­go Man­u­al of Style, no Asso­ci­at­ed Press Style­book, no video Ele­ments of Style.  There is also no agree­ment on how to cite the mov­ing image itself as a source in these oth­er, old­er types of media.

The Mov­ing Image: A User’s Man­u­al, pub­lished by the MIT Press on Feb­ru­ary 25, 2025, looks to make some bet­ter sense of this new medi­um as it starts to inher­it the man­tle that print has been wear­ing for almost six hun­dred years.  The book presents 34 QR codes that resolve to exam­ples of icon­ic mov­ing-image media, among them Abra­ham Zapruder’s film of the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion (1963); America’s poet lau­re­ate Ada Límon read­ing her work on Zoom; the first-ever YouTube video shot by some of the com­pa­ny founders at the San Fran­cis­co Zoo in 2005; Dar­nel­la Frazier’s video of George Floyd’s mur­der; Richard Feynman’s physics lec­tures at Cor­nell; course­ware videos from MIT, Colum­bia, and Yale; PBS doc­u­men­taries on race and music; Wik­ileaks footage of Amer­i­ca at war; Jan­u­ary 6 footage of the 2021 insur­rec­tion; inter­views with Holo­caust sur­vivors; films and clips from films by and inter­views with Sergei Eisen­stein, John Ford, Alfred Hitch­cock, Stan­ley Kubrick, Mar­tin Scors­ese, François Truf­faut and oth­ers; footage of deep fake videos; and the video bill­boards on the screens now all over New York’s Times Square.  The elec­tron­ic edi­tion takes you to their source plat­forms — YouTube, Vimeo, Wikipedia, the Inter­net Archive, oth­ers — at the click of a link.  The videos that you can play facil­i­tate deep-dive dis­cus­sions about how to inter­ro­gate and authen­ti­cate the facts (and untruths!) in and around them.

At a time when Trump dis­miss­es the direc­tor of our Nation­al Archives and the Orwellian putsch against mem­o­ry by the most pow­er­ful men in the world begins in full force, is it not essen­tial to equip our­selves with prop­er meth­ods for being able to cite truths and prove lies more eas­i­ly in what is now the medi­um of record?  How essen­tial will it become, in the face of sys­tem­at­ic efforts of era­sure, to pro­tect the evi­dence of crim­i­nal human deprav­i­ty – the record of Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camps shot by U.S. and U.K. and Russ­ian film­mak­ers; footage of war crimes, includ­ing our own from Wik­ileaks; video of the Jan­u­ary 6^th insur­rec­tion and attacks at the Amer­i­can Capi­tol – even as polit­i­cal lead­ers try to scrub it all and pre­tend it nev­er hap­pened?  We have to learn not only how to watch and process these audio­vi­su­al mate­ri­als, and how to keep this canon of media avail­able to gen­er­a­tions, but how to foot­note dia­logue record­ed, say, in a com­bat gun­ship over Bagh­dad in our his­to­ries of Amer­i­can for­eign pol­i­cy, police body­cam footage from Min­neapo­lis in our jour­nal­ism about civ­il rights, and secu­ri­ty cam­era footage of insur­rec­tion­ists plan­ning an attack on our Capi­tol in our books about the Unit­ed States.  And how should we cite with­in a doc­u­men­tary a music source or a local news clip in ways that the view­er can click on or vis­it?

Just like foot­notes and embed­ded sources and bib­li­ogra­phies do for read­able print, we have to devel­op an entire sys­tem­at­ic appa­ra­tus for cita­tion and ver­i­fi­ca­tion for the mov­ing image, to future-proof these truths.

* * *

At the very start of the 20^th cen­tu­ry, the ear­ly film­mak­er D. W. Grif­fith had not yet proph­e­sied his own vision of the film library:

Imag­ine a pub­lic library of the near future, for instance, there will be long rows of box­es or pil­lars, prop­er­ly clas­si­fied and indexed, of course. At each box a push but­ton and before each box a seat. Sup­pose you wish to “read up” on a cer­tain episode in Napoleon’s life. Instead of con­sult­ing all the author­i­ties, wad­ing labo­ri­ous­ly through a host of books, and end­ing bewil­dered, with­out a clear idea of exact­ly what did hap­pen and con­fused at every point by con­flict­ing opin­ions about what did hap­pen, you will mere­ly seat your­self at a prop­er­ly adjust­ed win­dow, in a sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly pre­pared room, press the but­ton, and actu­al­ly see what hap­pened.

No one yet had said, as peo­ple would a cen­tu­ry lat­er, that video will become the new ver­nac­u­lar.  But as radio and film quick­ly began to show their influ­ence, some of our smartest crit­ics began to sense their influ­ence.  In 1934, the art his­to­ri­an Erwin Panof­sky, yet to write his major works on Leonar­do da Vin­ci and Albrecht Dür­er, could deliv­er a talk at Prince­ton and say:

Whether we like it or not, it is the movies that mold, more than any oth­er sin­gle force, the opin­ions, the taste, the lan­guage, the dress, the behav­ior, and even the phys­i­cal appear­ance of a pub­lic com­pris­ing more than 60 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion of the earth. If all the seri­ous lyri­cal poets, com­posers, painters and sculp­tors were forced by law to stop their activ­i­ties, a rather small frac­tion of the gen­er­al pub­lic would become aware of the fact and a still small­er frac­tion would seri­ous­ly regret it. If the same thing were to hap­pen with the movies, the social con­se­quences would be cat­a­stroph­ic.

And in 1935, media schol­ars like Rudolf Arn­heim and Wal­ter Ben­jamin, alert to the dark­en­ing forces of pol­i­tics in Europe, would begin to notice the strange and some­times nefar­i­ous pow­er of the mov­ing image to shape polit­i­cal pow­er itself.  Ben­jamin would write in exile from Hitler’s Ger­many:

The cri­sis of democ­ra­cies can be under­stood as a cri­sis in the con­di­tions gov­ern­ing the pub­lic pre­sen­ta­tion of politi­cians. Democ­ra­cies [used to] exhib­it the politi­cian direct­ly, in per­son, before elect­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives. The par­lia­ment is his pub­lic. But inno­va­tions in record­ing equip­ment now enable the speak­er to be heard by an unlim­it­ed num­ber of peo­ple while he is speak­ing, and to be seen by an unlim­it­ed num­ber short­ly after­ward. This means that pri­or­i­ty is giv­en to pre­sent­ing the politi­cian before the record­ing equip­ment. […] This results in a new form of selection—selection before an apparatus—from which the cham­pi­on, the star, and the dic­ta­tor emerge as vic­tors.

At this cur­rent moment of cham­pi­ons and stars – and dic­ta­tors again – it’s time for us to under­stand the pow­er of video bet­ter and more deeply.  Indeed, part of the rea­son that we sense such epis­temic chaos, may­hem, dis­or­der in our world today may be that we haven’t come to terms with the fact of video’s pri­ma­cy.  We are still rely­ing on print as if it were, in a word, the last word, and suf­fer­ing through life in the absence of cita­tion and bib­li­o­graph­ic mech­a­nisms and sort­ing indices for the one medi­um that is gov­ern­ing more and more of our infor­ma­tion ecosys­tem every day.  Look at the home page of any news source and of our lead­ing pub­lish­ers.  Not just MIT from its pole posi­tion pro­duc­ing video knowl­edge through MIT Open­Course­Ware, but all knowl­edge insti­tu­tions, and many if not most jour­nals and radio sta­tions fea­ture video front and cen­ter now.  We are liv­ing at a moment when authors, pub­lish­ers, jour­nal­ists, schol­ars, stu­dents, cor­po­ra­tions, knowl­edge insti­tu­tions, and the pub­lic are involv­ing more video in their self-expres­sion.  Yet like 1906, before the Chica­go Man­u­al, or 1919 before Strunk’s lit­tle guide­book, we have had no pub­lished guide­lines for con­vers­ing about the big­ger pic­ture, no state­ment about the impor­tance of the mov­ing-image world we are build­ing, and no col­lec­tive approach to under­stand­ing the medi­um more sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly and from all sides.  We are trans­form­ing at the mod­ern pace that print explod­ed in the six­teenth cen­tu­ry, but still with­out the appa­ra­tus to grap­ple with it that we devel­oped, again for print, in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth.

* * *

Pub­lic access to knowl­edge always faces bar­ri­ers that are easy for us to see, but also many that are invis­i­ble. Video is matur­ing now as a field. Could we say that it’s still young? That it still needs to be saved – con­stant­ly saved – from com­mer­cial forces encroach­ing upon it that, if left unreg­u­lat­ed, could soon strip it of any remain­ing man­date to serve soci­ety?  Could we say that we need to save our­selves, in fact, from “sur­ren­der­ing,” as Mar­shall McLuhan wrote some 60 years ago now, “our sens­es and ner­vous sys­tems to the pri­vate manip­u­la­tion of those who would try to ben­e­fit from tak­ing a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, [such that] we don’t real­ly have any rights left”?  Before we have irrev­o­ca­bly and per­ma­nent­ly “leased our cen­tral ner­vous sys­tems to var­i­ous cor­po­ra­tions”?

You bet we can say it, and we should.  For most of the 130 years of the mov­ing image, its pro­duc­ers and con­trollers have been elites—and way too often they’ve attempt­ed with their con­trol of the medi­um to make us think what they want us to think. We’ve been scared over most of these years into believ­ing that the mov­ing image right­ful­ly belongs under the purview of large pri­vate or state inter­ests, that the screen is some­thing that oth­ers should con­trol.  That’s just non­sense.  Unlike the ear­ly pio­neers of print, their suc­ces­sors who for­mu­lat­ed copy­right law, and their suc­ces­sors who’ve got­ten us into a world where so much print knowl­edge is under the con­trol of so few, we – in the age of video – can study cen­turies of squan­dered oppor­tu­ni­ties for free­ing knowl­edge, cen­turies of mis­takes, scores of hot­foot­ed mis­steps and wrong turns, and learn from them.  Once we under­stand that there are oth­er options, oth­er roads not tak­en, we can begin to imag­ine that a very dif­fer­ent media sys­tem is – was and is – emi­nent­ly pos­si­ble.  As one of our great media his­to­ri­ans has writ­ten, “[T]he Amer­i­can media system’s devel­op­ment was the direct result of polit­i­cal strug­gle that involved sup­press­ing those who agi­tat­ed for cre­at­ing less mar­ket-dom­i­nat­ed media insti­tu­tions. . . . [That this] cur­rent com­mer­cial media sys­tem is con­tin­gent on past repres­sion calls into ques­tion its very legit­i­ma­cy.”

The mov­ing image is like­ly to facil­i­tate the most extra­or­di­nary advances ever in edu­ca­tion, schol­ar­ly com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and knowl­edge dis­sem­i­na­tion. Imag­ine what will hap­pen once we real­ize the promise of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to gen­er­ate mass quan­ti­ties of schol­ar­ly video about knowl­edge – video sum­maries by experts and machines of every book and arti­cle ever writ­ten and of every movie and TV pro­gram ever pro­duced.

We just have to make sure we get there.  We had bet­ter think as a col­lec­tive how to climb out of what jour­nal­ist Han­na Rosin calls this “epis­temic chasm of cuck­oo.”  And it doesn’t help – although it might help our sense of urgency – that the Amer­i­can pres­i­dent has turned the White House Oval Office into a tele­vi­sion stu­dio. Recall that Trump end­ed his Feb­ru­ary meet­ing with Volodymyr Zelen­skyy by say­ing to all the cam­eras there, “This’ll make great tele­vi­sion.”

The Mov­ing Image: A User’s Man­u­al exists for all these rea­sons, and it address­es these chal­lenges.  And these chal­lenges have every­thing to do with the gen­er­al epis­temic chaos we find our­selves in, with so many peo­ple believ­ing any­thing and so much out there that is untrue.  We have to solve for it.

As the poets like to say, the only way out is through.

–Peter B. Kauf­man works at MIT Open Learn­ing. He is the author of The New Enlight­en­ment and the Fight to Free Knowl­edge and founder of Intel­li­gent Tele­vi­sion, a video pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny that works with cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions around the world. His new book, The Mov­ing Image: A User’s Man­u­al, is just out from the MIT Press.