Living History. 11/4/08.
Any reader of this blog knows I am huge political junky. Well, I'm also a huge history buff. So I was very excited to check out 11/4/08 at SXSW because it deals with both of those things. 11/4/08 examines the idea of a historical moment through crowd sourced footage of the day Barack Obama was elected president, a day we were all told would be history in the making should he be elected. What the film does so incredibly successfully is examine the double sidedness of that claim. By that I mean that, curator/editor Jeff Deutchman appreciates the historical importance of the election of the first African American president as the true historical triumph that it was, but he also puts us right back in that moment where people associated Obama's election with a historical change, that we had basis in reality. Obama could be another Lincoln. He could also be another Taft. On that day, though, he was the embodiment of our expectations of hope that things could be better. And that excitement permeates the film, however how the audience reacts to that excitement, I think, is inescapably intertwined with the political circumstances of the moment you watch it. I saw the film a little over a week ago. Health Care reform has been gumming up the government for over 10 months, and, although the end was insight, it felt like our government was irreparably broken. Because of that dim view of Washington the film presented a moment of dreamy, delusion. Now, just two weeks later, seeing that Obama has pushed through probably the biggest piece of social legislation in my lifetime, my relationship to what the film presents is much more hopeful and nostalgic. That's an incredibly filmmaking achievement - the cinematic capturing of the malleability of history.
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