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Pat Aufderheide
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March 2002 - P.O.V. has fascinated me since its launch, whether or not I have enjoyed particular programs on it, because it's not just a TV series, but a project in truly public media. It has been and continues to be a test-bed for television for a polycultural democracy — something counter-intuitive in a television culture whose terms are set by advertisers.
What I mean by "public" here is not first-come-first-served (like public access cable), or public in the sense of government like a GAO document, or even public in the sense of noncommercial, like much of public TV. What I mean is media that inhabits and helps to stake a claim to electronic public space — a channel, a place on the dial, a URL where people go not only to get what they want to see, but also to find out what other people are up to, what they think they need and are upset about. The electronic public space they visit lets them both engage with others, and also respond. That kind of public space doesn't just happen. It's cultivated. It isn't less public because there are gatekeepers. The gatekeepers are also groundskeepers. They encourage the kind of communication that nurtures understanding and problem solving.
Labor Day marchers in 1934, "The Uprising of '34" (1995)
That sense of the public is an old tradition in the U.S., but a tradition poorly-served by the mass media upon which most people depend for a basic sense of what and who is around them, just over the hill beyond their line of sight.
P.O.V.'s program material defies the format-and-flow logic of television, and even much of public TV. Rather, P.O.V. promises viewers the personal voice, the individually crafted comment, the perspective or subject not often seen on television. Further, it shows those perspectives as the viewpoints of someone in particular, a filmmaker, who in a carefully-edited interview, explains why they made that movie. So, the films it shows have an immediacy, an unexpectedness to them, just by not being what you're used to clicking past. They also, each of them, act as tiny media literacy modules, because they resist the babbling-brook quality of predictable programming and reveal the maker. They are showing viewers how to look into the form, and they remind viewers that somebody made this, someone who wants to connect with them.
More, the series locates each program, each individual perspective, within a social frame. The point with P.O.V. is not merely to see and hear something or someone different or unusual. That we can get with Survivor or from Montel. The promise is that this perspective matters to viewers as social beings: as active citizens, members of a community, participants in a democracy that has to create itself every day with democratic actions. The offer is not only to see but to engage with the program's perspective, leaving viewers in the shocking position of going beyond a thumbs-up or thumbs-down position, beyond a consumer rating. They can engage not only with the program's maker, among other ways through the Talking Back video segment, but with other viewers, through electronic discussion forums and face-to-face community meetings. This is actually a lot to ask. It's also quite a gesture of respect to one's viewers.
When P.O.V. began, it looked less like an experiment in electronic public space, and more like a defiantly progressive TV series. It could have been a short-lived concession to the mouthy, contrarian, left wing of indies. If it had, then it would have been another sad footnote in public TV history, like the abortive indie public affairs series Crisis to Crisis and Matters of Life and Death. Instead, from the start P.O.V. tackled the central problem of publicness, and has gotten better at it over time.
Contention was built into its origins in an independent movement, which was often oppositional to the mainstream of public TV. Its endurance, though, has depended on coming up with ways to acknowledge and even highlight conflict, while also making exposure to that conflict productive for viewers.
Filmmaker Ross McElwee, "Bright Leaves" (2005)
The endurance strategy has developed over time. P.O.V. is one of the products of a decades-long mobilization of independent filmmakers for space to show their work. Independent filmmakers themselves emerged as a pressure group, as a result of the roiling period of civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s. Those social movements that transformed the landscape — civil rights for African-Americans and other ethnic groups, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, disability rights — also gave young people the extraordinary idea that they had the right to communicate using the most powerful expressive and persuasive medium of the time: moving image media.
By the time P.O.V. began, there was a battle-scarred history of independents fighting for space on television. In the process, they formed trade associations, media arts organizations, independent distributors, and other groups that linked moving image media and public life. The only place where there was any real room to fight, of course, was public television. There, by the 1980s, "independents were a major force in creating social-issue program strands and minority consortia." They pushed Congress to create The Independent Television Service. ITVS went on to become another test bed for electronic public space, with its own trials and errors. The year before, P.O.V. launched.
One of P.O.V.'s early celebrities was the late Marlon Riggs, and it was his "Tongues Untied" (1991) that really tested the premise that P.O.V. was offering not merely points of view, but a public space within which points of view could be not only expressed but heard, seen, and responded to. Neither station managers nor many viewers were ready for a video poem on gay black identity, while others cried censorship when stations didn't air it, and Senator Jesse Helms used it as proof of the need to defund public television.
The battle over "Tongues Untied" created many wounds, but P.O.V. also used it to raise the most basic question: what's public about public TV? The program's controversies exposed the need to locate clearly, within a public frame, the subjects that were worth giving screen time, precisely because they were points of conflict for a poly-cultural, democratic society. P.O.V.'s pioneering experiments with community engagement, viewer response, and electronic platforms for building of in-depth discussions among viewers began as a result of this turmoil, as Ellen Schneider, the architect of the strategy, explains elsewhere.
As documentary formats have morphed with commercial pressures and new technologies, P.O.V. has sought out the trends and stories with public relevance. For instance, in the mid-1990s, tabloid television was tearing down the last barriers to raw intimacy on screen, and reality television was brewing. Among indies, new technologies and new funding options (among them, ITVS funding that offered full funding for low-budget films) promoted a wave of independent personal essay and memoir films. P.O.V. found a publicly relevant thread in this cultural trend of onscreen soul-baring. "Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter," Deborah Hoffman's extraordinary, loving portrait of her relationship with her Alzheimer's-afflicted mother; "Silverlake Life," a chronicle of a gay couple's slow death by AIDS, made by Peter Friedman; and a Laotian-American teen mother's diary, "Kelly Loves Tony," made with Spencer Nakasako, among others, match intimacy with dignity. They bring human warmth to big social issues, and P.O.V. offered viewers a way to link the two.
I hope that P.O.V. continues to experiment within the parameters of public engagement, continues to tap into the social passion of filmic storytellers, continues to explore the possibilities of new technologies to make connections. More, I hope that these experiments become widely discussed and useful to public media programmers everywhere. The central problem of public media is establishing and cultivating truly public spaces, where people can engage with the challenges and conflicts of an open society, and where viewers can become true members of the public.
— Pat Aufderheide
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Pat Aufderheide is a professor in the School of Communications at The American University and the director of the Center for Social Media. She is a prolific cultural journalist, policy analyst, and editor on media and society and has received numerous journalism and scholarly awards.
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